Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

It was a term once used to describe exceptional jazz musicians. African-Americans spelled it “hepcat,” while their white counterparts heard “cat” and assumed “hep” to be a modifier. Hence, “hep cat.”In 1942 Bob Clampett created the first color Looney Tunes cartoon, The Hep Cat, featuring an unnamed feline that would later develop a lisp and become known as Sylvester, (derived from silvestris, the scientific name for the cat species.) Soon, people were being referred to as all kinds of cats, as in cool cat, crazy cat, and “hep” became “hip.”And it all came from the African Wolof word “hipikat,” meaning, “someone finely attuned to his/her environment.” Makes sense, right? An inspired improv from a blower in sync with his fellow jazz musicians would trigger the rejoinder “hipikat” from a bystander familiar with the African word. Anglos heard “hep cat” and a new, misheard word was born.Language is an interesting thing. If you enjoyed that brief summary of “hep cat,” then you're definitely my brand of crazy. I enjoyed it, too. Arooo! Aroo-Arooooo!New subject: Winning a RaceNothing changes when you win a footrace. But the person who wins the hearts of men and women can wonderfully change the future. Do you have the skill to win the eye, the ear, the doubting heart? Can you win the human race?Wizard Academy is a school of the communication arts. The majority of our students come to us to learn how to create ads that will make them money, make presentations that will make them money, or win promotions at work that will make them money. The footrace of business holds a magnetic attraction; it never ceases to draw a crowd, easily winning the mind and wallet. Please don't think I'm disparaging it.But the heart, the heart, remains in the hands of the arts. Journalists and novelists and screenwriters and musicians, painters and poets, playwrights and performers, sculptors and singers, architects and photographers shape our ever-changing mood and guide us toward the future. Artists such as these are attending Wizard Academy in increasing numbers since the methods and principles we teach are just as easily applied to the arts as they are to business.Alumni interested in furthering their knowledge of the heart-arts will be delighted to know that discussions are continuing with acad-grad David Freeman to bring his paradigm-expanding Visual Emotioneering course to Wizard Academy. David is currently the object of an epic tug-of-war, with Hollywood pulling him into movies and Japan pulling him into video games. Both are willing to pay whatever it takes, but David really wants to hang with his homies at the Academy. Stay tuned.Another Acad-grad Writes a Big Book: Bag the Elephant(subtitled, How to Win and Keep BIG Customers.)Steve Kaplan is the nicest guy you'll ever meet, the boy every mom wishes her daughter would bring home for dinner. He could easily have been a regular on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.So did Steve became rich as a salesman because he was nice, or in spite of it? In his new book, Steve tells you exactly how he bagged the elephants, and how you can, too. I strongly suggest you pick up a copy at your local bookstore, or order one at amazon.com, (discounted there to just $13.57 in hardback.) Grab it now, before the first printing is all sold out and a waiting list is formed. And keep your eye on the bestseller lists. Wizard Academy grads are on the move.Join us, and become hipikat.Roy H. Williams

Media fragmentation and the evolution of social values are forcing advertisers to spend more and more money to reach fewer and fewer people. Two weeks ago I mentioned the possibility of using non-traditional media (NTM) as a supplement to your advertising. One of the most effective forms of NTM today is Corporate Art.Think of it as advertising, but of a permanent sort.What are the landmarks in your town?The faces on Mt. Rushmore were funded by the state of South Dakota to bring tourism and money to the state. It worked.That famous hillside HOLLYWOOD sign was erected to sell lots in a 1920's Los Angeles subdivision. It worked.America's most precious paintings of the romantic West were originally commissioned by railroads to be published in magazine ads and on calendars in an effort to stimulate travel by rail. It worked. Taos and Sedona and Santa Fe are thriving today because of the romantic glow of those ads.In fact, many of our most important cultural icons began as corporate art: Cinderella's Castle at Disney World. The Chrysler Building in New York. Rockefeller Center. Times Square. Carnegie Hall. Each of these is architectural, corporate art.Standing 76 feet tall, Tulsa's kitschy corporate art is the Golden Driller, a mammoth oilman with his hand atop a drilling rig, a gift to the city of Tulsa from Mid-Continent Supply Company in 1953. Having grown up there, I can tell you that no other icon is as deeply associated with the town. The Golden Driller's image is everywhere.According to Wizard of Ads partner Sonja Howle, Corporate Art:1. Communicates (A) your brand essence. (B) the core values of your company.2. Stimulates employee pride.3. Can be used repeatedly (A) to cut costs in ad production, (B) on calendars, invitations, thank-you cards, etc.4. Triggers community recognition, opens a door for press coverage.5. Offers tax benefits.6. Appreciates as a corporate asset.7. Establishes an ongoing legacy.Does your company have something to say to the world that might be expressed in art?We'll talk a little more about Corporate Art as a Tool of Marketing – as well as several other iterations of NTM – at the upcoming Academy Reunion and Open House on Oct. 15.See you there.Roy H. Williams

I am, for the moment, alive and well as an ad writer. But I feel I'm being stalked by iPods, cell phones, instant messaging, and increasingly fragmented media choices. And they're all gunning for my life.Over-communication rides rampant across the mindscape of America, putting greater-than-ever pressure on ad writers to create ads that produce results.Today I will teach you how to write such ads.The opening line is the key to impact. So open big. I'm not talking about hype; “Save up to 75 percent off this week only at blah, blah blah.” I'm talking about a statement that is fundamentally more interesting than what had previously occupied your customer's mind.Wasn't your attention piqued by the opening line, “I Did Not Die Today?” Magnetism is why I chose it. Frankly, I had no idea how I was going to bridge from that opening line into the subject matter at hand. But it can always be done.Be bold and have confidence; a bridge can be built from any concept to any other concept.Here's a glimpse of an advanced technique I call Chaotic Ad Writing:1. Don't consider your subject matter before deciding how to introduce it.2. Never open with “ad-speak.” especially one of those insultingly obvious questions directed at the customer, such as, “Are you interested in saving money?” These questions are so overused they've deteriorated into horrible clichés. Provocative rhetorical questions are okay however, such as “Whatever happened to Gerald Ford?”3. Think of a magnetic opening statement from way beyond the fence in left field; something certain to captivate.4. Figure out how to bridge from that opener into your subject matter.5. The opening line will surprise Broca's Area of the brain and gain you entrance to the central executive of working memory, conscious awareness, focused attention. The central executive will then decide whether the thought has relevance to the listener. This is what your bridge must supply.6. Write a bridge that justifies your magnetic opening line. If you fall short here, your opener will be perceived as hype. Game over.7. Insert your subject matter into the seam created by your opening line and bridge.8. Close by looping back to your opening line.It's really not that hard.Hey, that's another good opener: “It's really not that hard.” You could easily bridge from that opening line into a powerful ad for any product or service.Here are some other openers for you to try:“I've heard your heart stops when you sneeze.”“I like the TV commercials with the Keebler elves.”“Plutonium is the rarest of all substances.”Here's what I've done so far:1. I opened with “I Did Not Die Today,” having absolutely no idea how I would bridge from that line into the subject matter of this memo.2. I created a bridge to justify my opening line: “I am, for the moment, alive and well as an ad writer. But I feel I'm being stalked by iPods, cell phones, instant messaging and increasingly fragmented media choices. And they're all gunning for my life.”3. I gave you details to satisfy the central executive's demand for relevance: “Over-communication rides rampant across the mindscape of America, putting greater-than-ever pressure on ad writers to create ads that produce results for the customer. Today I will teach you how to write such ads.”4. I inserted my subject matter into the seam created by my opening line and bridge; I gave you a new writing technique.5. Now it's time to close by looping back to the opening line. Let's see if I can do it:The times are changing, and so must ad writers if we will live to see another day. Will you change with the times? Or will you continue to wear the blindfold of yesterday's ad-writing style and walk voluntarily before the firing squad?Roy H. Williams

Do you remember the Seinfeld episode where Jerry, George and Elaine are waiting for a table in a Chinese restaurant? The plot revolves around the fact that George is desperate to make a phone call but the other guy won't get off the pay phone. That was 1991. The fact that somebody might have a phone in their pocket was unthinkable.How about the Bubble Boy episode where Jerry and Elaine's car gets separated from George and Susan's car on the highway? Again the plot revolves around the fact that there's no possible way for them to reach each other. That was 1993.Not many years ago I bought a new Mercedes with a factory telephone mounted in the console. The handset was corded like a standard desk phone. No one thought it looked ridiculous. That car was a 1999 model.180 million Americans now carry cell phones in their purses or pockets and many of these are able to receive full-motion video. Newspaper, radio and television are no longer the new kids on the block. Even Ted Turner's cable and Japan's VHS tapes – once the bold new voices of a brave tomorrow – have become weary, bleary and stale.Like it or not, we're entering an age of non-traditional media.As I warned you 14 months ago, media is losing its mass. Each moment we're online is a moment we're not reading the newspaper or watching TV. Each minute we spend listening to a CD or an iPod is a minute we're not listening to the radio. None of these technologies will deal a deathblow to traditional mass media, but only a fool would contend they're not collectively shrinking it.Please hear me right: Mass media isn't going to go away or “quit working.” It's merely going to become less effective than it has been in the past. This is why the 41 worldwide Wizard of Ads partners are aggressively investigating NTM, or “non-traditional media,” including product placement in video games and news shows, localized ads on satellite radio, hyperlinks from blogs, streaming video-on-demand to cell phones, and other new voices in the information avalanche.Six years ago, the Monday Memo you're reading right now was distributed only by FAX. Email wasn't really viable as a replacement. Six. Short. Years.You and I are surrounded by glittering new technologies. Our attitudes about advertising are evolving as well. In short, we're no longer entirely a “me” generation. Our kids are teaching us to become an interconnected “we,” saying, “Your advertising may fool one of us, but that one will tell the rest of us.”The most powerful of today's non-traditional media are also the most overlooked:1: Word of Mouth. It can be bought. But do you know how?2: Your Sales Staff. Are they winning converts, or merely making sales?3: Your Website. Would you like to see it finally start working?A few weeks ago I told you to set aside October 15 to attend the Wizard Academy reunion and open house and promised that details would be announced “in a few weeks.”Here are those promised details.I'll be making virgin presentations on 3 new topics:1. Direct Marketing: the equal-but-opposite corollary to Branding.2. Non-Traditional Media: what's coming, what's already here, and how to use it NOW.3. Word of Mouth: How to plan it and buy it like any other media.Space limitations at the new campus dictate that we accept only the first 200 registrants. Sorry, but if your name isn't on the master list, you won't get past the security guard. We deeply regret that it has to be this way, but the Monday Memo subscriber list has grown too large for us to not put limitations on our invitations.Robert Frost and Ponyboy were right; nothing gold can stay.Come to Austin October 15 and see the treasure map that reveals where tomorrow's gold is buried.Roy H. Williams

COURTESY NOTE: This is one of those days when I write about something other than business.Have you ever been in a K-Mart during a “flashing blue light special?” The sad circus begins when an employee rolls out a chrome cart with a rotating blue light on a pole about 8 feet high. A voice on the intercom says, “Attention K-Mart shoppers,” and then tells you know how lucky you are to be in the store right now. They're about to offer an unadvertised special. Just follow the flashing blue light.Watching those poor people follow that light is profoundly sad to me. It's the reason I quit shopping at K-Mart.Our world is full of flashing blue lights that cause us to lose our focus and forget the reason we're here. Is there a blue light in your life right now?Blue lights often arrive as an adversary that begs to be defeated.No, I'm not talking about the war in Iraq. I'm talking about you and the distractions that cause you to forget your real purpose.Have you allowed the merely urgent to replace the truly important?I've made this memo short to help you justify taking a few minutes from your crazy schedule to just sit and think about what life is really all about.Do it now. For yourself, and the people you love.The world will wait.Roy H. Williams

Okay, let's be clear about this: I'm proud of myself today. So proud, in fact, that you might want to skip reading this memo because all I'm going to do is strut. It could become sickening. Seriously.Frankly, I can't believe you're still reading after a warning like that.First it was Dr. Burkhardt Maess of the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience who proved my longstanding assertion that Broca's area of the brain anticipates the predictable. (This is important to you and me because Predictability is the killer of attention. If we want to gain and hold human attention, we must know how to stimulate Broca.)Now neurologist Friedemann Pulvermuller of the Medical Research Council in Cambridge has shocked the scientific community by announcing that Wernicke's area and Broca's area gather sensory data from other brain areas and then compile it into complex mental images. According to the article, “These results challenge the theory that isolated, language-specific brain structures discern word meanings. Instead, they propose word understanding hinges on activation of interconnected brain areas that pull together knowledge about that particular word and its associated actions and sensations.”Anyone who has attended one of my public seminars since 1996 has heard me explain this whole “pulling sensory data from associated areas” process in detail. I wrote about it in a series of Monday Morning Memos in 2001 and 2002 and then finally laid the matter to rest with the April, 2003 publication of the audiobook with transcript, Thought Particles: Binary Code of the Mind. Its description says, “This limited-edition insight contains one audio CD and one illustration CD unveiling the Wizard's theories on how thoughts are assembled in the mind from stored sensory associations.”Why does any of this matter? Because the purpose of Wizard Academy is to forward the expansion of the communication arts.Our goal is to teach you how to more effectively change:1. what people think, and2. how they feel.To do this, we must study how thoughts and feelings are gathered, stored, processed, and retrieved from memory.Last week I wrote, “Wizard Academy is a school of the communication arts. We study all the languages of the mind, including shape, color, position, ratio, pitch, key, tempo, contour, musical interval, rhythm and architecture. But words have been the highest form of communication since Genesis chapter one, when God spoke a universe into existence and then created us in his image.”But that is not to say that words are the only language of the mind. Wizard Academy is in the process of expanding its curricula to include investigations into the languages of:1. music2. color3. shapes and symbols4. ritual (as the language of a sports or business tribe)5. phonemes6. schema and worldview (as boundaries to understanding)7. meter8. mathematics (as a language of business, with emphasis on the ratios mentioned on pages 144-145 of Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads.If you're an academy grad and would like to be considered as a possible instructor for one of these or another new curricula, please let Pennie@wizardacademy.org know of your field of interest and your current depth of research into it.Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to march around the room and sing the Poky Little Puppy song at the top of my lungs (pages 192-193 of Secret Formulas.)Roy H. Williams

One of these days I'm going to calculate the odds of pulling away from a drive-thru window and actually finding what was ordered in the bag.For 3 years I've been calculating the odds of getting extra lemon for your tea when you add the phrase “lots of lemon, please” in America's better restaurants. Currently, this request will get you some small quantity of extra lemon 47.4 percent of the time; usually a single, sad slice alongside the sliver you were going to get anyway.If you really want “lots of lemon,” you must raise the impact quotient of your message; paint a bigger picture in the mind. Smile and say, “I'd like iced tea with so many lemons that they slide off the table onto the floor. I'm talking about this restaurant being knee-deep in lemons when I leave, so many lemons that it takes two men and a little boy to carry them all. Will you do that for me?”Do I get lots of lemon when I say this? Yes. Do I enjoy doing it? No. Do I think it's witty, cute, clever, funny? No.I do it because I want the lemons.What do you want? And how have you been asking for it?Do you typically assume that people are paying attention when you speak? E. M. Cioran said, “If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.” I fear he was probably right.The key to being understood is to raise the impact quotient of your message.Have you figured out yet that we're talking about advertising? And sermons? And classroom lectures? And effective web copy? And blockbuster screenplays? And Pulitzer prize winning journalism?The higher the impact quotient of your message, the less repetition is required to enter into declarative memory. The higher the impact quotient, the bigger the scene painted on the visuospatial sketchpad of working memory in the dorsolateral prefrontal association area of the brain.Wizard Academy is a school of the communication arts. We study all the languages of the mind, including shape, color, position, ratio, pitch, key, tempo, contour, musical interval, rhythm and architecture. But words have been the highest form of communication since Genesis chapter one, when God spoke a universe into existence and then created us in his image.Learn to harness the power of words. Can you name anything else that will make as big a difference in your life?Roy H. Williams

Earth's population reached 1 billion persons in 1804, 2 billion in 1927, 3 billion in '59, 4 billion in '74 and 5 billion in late '86. And on October 12th, 1999, Earth's population surpassed 6 billion.The number of passengers on Spaceship Earth has doubled (from 3 billion – 1959, to 6 billion – 1999,) in 40 short years. But we're not discussing population growth today, I'm just opening your eyes to perceptual reality.The cognoscenti of Magical Worlds will remember a brief discussion of perceptual reality at the beginning of class. “Each of you will sit in this room for 3 days and hear the same information presented in precisely the same way. But you'll leave here having had an entirely different experience from the persons on your left and your right. You will connect different dots, have different epiphanies, make different associations. Objective reality will be the same for each of you. But your perceptual realities will be yours alone.”There are 525,948.766 minutes in a year. This means that each minute, the 6 billion of us experience a collective 11,408 years of perceptual reality. And each day we live a collective 16,427,455 years.Given that we lived nearly sixteen and a half million years yesterday, it seems like one of us would've figured out how to end poverty, crime and war, doesn't it? (Personally, I was really busy, so I was counting on you.)Today's illustration is an image of the famous mime, Marcel Marceau, superimposed over a photo of Earth with snapshots of women and men on its surface. To the right is the cover of Paul Finley's awesome 14 Windows guitar CD.You, reader, saw the same image as 30,000 other subscribers, but your perception was yours alone. You may have been confused by the image, amused by it, intrigued by it, or mildly or strongly disturbed by it. Perhaps you even saw a symbolic statement being made. I did not intend one.Perceptual reality is yours alone.Every door of opportunity begins as a window in your mind.Look through that window of imagination and glimpse a world that could be, someday. Keep looking… Be patient… And watch it grow into a door of Opportunity through which you might pass into an entirely different future.Opportunity never knocks. But it hangs thick in the air all around you. You breathe it unthinking, and dissipate it with your sighs.Opportunity never knocks. It appears, flickering, like faulty neon at a nondescript fork in the road.Opportunity never knocks. It whispers, a tickle in your distracted mind.So what are you going to do? Will you sleep, unaware of the miracles that need your assistance, or will you open your eyes, look through that window, and begin doing what only you can do?Roy H. Williams

Last week a client achieved 42 percent of his market potential. Never before had I seen a business break the 40 percent barrier. It was kind of like seeing someone run a four-minute mile. I knew it was possible in theory, but I never thought I'd actually see it.Ben had come to Austin for his annual marketing retreat. After the usual pleasantries, he said, “Traffic is flat, sales are flat, and I'm not happy.”“Ben, you've done everything that can be done. You've trained your staff, created a tantalizing compensation structure for them, advertised relentlessly, added every conceivable product line that might increase your attractiveness to your customer, refined your purchasing methods so that your prices are visibly better, built a fabulous new store for the comfort of your customers, and through it all, not one of your competitors has awakened.”“Are you saying that 3 and a half million is all that can be done in my town?” he bristled.Looking him calmly in the eyes, I carefully enunciated a single word: “Evidently.”Business owners, I tell Ben's story to give you a glimpse of the Realities of the Marketplace:1. Impact Quotient. How powerful is your message compared to your competitors'? This is the Impact Quotient of your message, whether it's delivered through mass media, face-to-face by your salespeople, or word-of-mouth by your customers to their friends. Advertising is more effective when you have something to say.2. Market Size/Ad Budget Ratio. How big is your town relative to your ad budget? The more populated the trade area, the more expensive it is to advertise. How able are you?3. Competitive Environment. How good are you at what you do? More importantly, how good are your competitors and how many of them are there? Each of them is going to retain some customers regardless of what you do.4. Market Potential. What is the potential of your trade area? The total dollars spent in your product category is a not a number you're likely to change. The question is, what percentage of that total will be yours?Do you know your category's market potential in your trade area? Can you name the degree of your market penetration?Until a business achieves 4 to 6 percent of their market potential, they usually lack the financial steam to sustain a serious move on the marketplace. But when they've accumulated sufficient cash and courage, the ride to 25 percent is wooly and wonderful. Growing from 25 to 33 percent is much harder than the jump from 5 to 25. And creeping from 33 to 40 happens only when you're blessed with very weak competitors.Ben's total trade area contains 125,000 people. Statistically, they'll spend 67 dollars per person/per year in his product category. This gives Ben a market potential of 8,375,000 dollars. Growing from half a million to 2.1 million was fun and easy. Growing from 2.1 to 3.5 required Ben to stretch his comfort zone far beyond what most business owners would have been willing to consider. No stone has been left unturned in the 7 years we've been working together.“Ben, the way I see it, you've got four choices:1. Fire us and hire an ad firm that will tell you what you want to hear.2. Start a new business in an unrelated category in your town.3. Launch your existing category in another town.4. Shut up and be happy with what you've accomplished.”I knew that Ben would never do number 4. I figured he'd go for number 2, or possibly even number 1. To my surprise, he immediately picked number 3. “Roy,” he said, “You may not remember it, but you told me three years ago when I built the new store that I needed to be thinking about what I was going to do next. You said building that store was the final thing I might do to improve volume in my town. It looks like you were right.”We spent the rest of that day evaluating towns for an excited Ben to visit in 4 different states. He's on the road picking one now, and then we'll start climbing again.Business can be fun when you work with people of courage.Do you?This week we've spoken about marketplace realities. Next week I'll tell you about a reality of a different sort.Roy H. Williams

If you want to glimpse the inner forces that drive an organization, you need only observe their methods and listen to their words. Especially when they're not paying attention.Words and methods reveal motives. Listen to a person carefully and you will hear the beating of their heart. Do what they do and you'll become who they are. So be careful whose advice you take and whose methods you adopt.You cannot use the tools of another without placing your hands where their hands have been. Desire their outcome, adopt their methods, and you embrace the values that are hidden beneath.Advertising in America got twisted and bent when it became fashionable to read The Art of War.The most commonly used words in marketing today are “target” and “objective.” Strange ideas for retailers, don't you think, when their goals are to attract and serve? Let's replace those two words, then, and see how it affects the heart.Advertising consultants, instead of asking, “Who is your target?” why not ask, “Who are we hoping to attract?” Instead of asking “What is our objective? ask, “How are we hoping to serve?” Prepare yourself for strange and revealing reactions to these questions because while it's fashionable to spout about having “great service,” few want to truly serve.Business people, do you want to attract multitudes? Develop the heart of a servant – one who truly loves – and you will quickly become beloved. The world has masters aplenty; it is servants who are in short supply.I'm not the first to note how words and actions reveal the heart. Luke tells of a dawn two thousand years ago when Jesus walked grass still wet with dew. After choosing from among a great crowd of followers the twelve who would accompany him to the end, Jesus stepped forward and spoke to the waiting throng, “The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks.”Now let's look at Jesus' actions – beginning with his choosing of the twelve – and see if they reveal his motives: The fact that none of them were leaders in the business community indicates that he wasn't planning to measure membership or attendance numbers, build a bank account or launch a political action committee. “Minister” was more of a verb in his day.Flash forward to his final day in John 13: “… so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples' feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him.” The twelve were aghast. Foot washing was like scrubbing a public toilet or scraping gum off the bottom of bus benches. “Do you understand what I have done for you?” Jesus asked them. “I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.”Consciously or unconsciously, each of us follows a hero. We model our actions after their actions and measure our success according to their values. Are you consciously aware of whose example you are following? Look quietly to your daily actions and you'll find your hero vividly revealed.Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War five hundred years before Jesus felt the morning grass beneath his feet.Somehow I doubt he ever read it.Roy H. Williams