Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

You had friends and laughter, adventure and romance. Remember the halcyon days of your youth? But then the friends went away, the laughter faded, the adventure ended and the romance was over.It was time to go to work.Do you ever feel like you're wearing ankle irons, condemned to row forever with the other galley slaves in the dim life below ship's deck? “I too have had my dreams: ay, known indeed the crowded visions of a fiery youth which haunt me still.” – Oscar WildeOne of the happy accidents of Wizard Academy is that students often rediscover who they were when they were young. They come to the academy to become better salespeople and scientists, journalists and educators, authors and ministers, business people and bar bouncers, ad writers and artists and we certainly make them those things. But somewhere along the way, students remember how to love their lives again and the dream-seed that fell into the ground during the dark days of winter breaks through the warm soil of spring to shout its message to the sky.“Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.” – Studs TerkelI want you to come to Austin on April 23. It's a Saturday. Tuscan Hall, our auditorium, is now complete except for the flagstone plaza and water features that will surround it and we'll certainly have those done before you get here. Likewise, construction is ahead of schedule for the April 23 opening of Chapel Dulcinea, the small, cliff's-edge structure that symbolizes the academy's heart and provides the fuel for its dreams.What are the dreams of Wizard Academy? To build a school of discovery in the arts and sciences: in short, the Harvard of a brighter tomorrow. Our students, partners, and adjunct faculty are already changing the world of business through more persuasive ad writing, 'New School' sales training, and revolutionary internet solutions. Additionally, my partner Sonja Howle will soon be taking the reigns of our Art Marketing Workshop to help artists in every discipline – all over the world – make a better living from their work because we are convinced their work is essential. We'll soon be adding a new course in visionary architecture taught by one of America's greatest living architects who, miraculously, has agreed to participate in our April 23 event to explain in detail all the symbolism and feeling that is woven into the very architecture of the school. Prepare to be amazed.Now I need you to take a slow breath and sit down, okay? Because I'm getting ready to share with you a part of the dream that could easily sound delusional: It is our conviction that this school will exist and thrive for at least 500 years. That's why we've been careful to use only such construction materials and techniques that will withstand the wear of centuries.Every organization closely tied to the identity of its founder dies shortly after its founder's passing. We don't want that to happen. That's why the academy is now a non-profit organization governed by a board of directors beyond my control. It must become independent of me long before I'm gone. I will not build a monument to myself. Look closely at any of my bestselling Wizard of Ads books and you'll see that my name isn't on the cover of any of them. This was my choice. My plan from the beginning has been only to kick open closed doors and point toward the horizon for an army of world-changers who will follow. Will you be counted among them?The Academy's students, faculty and directors want the school's powerful, inside-out way of thinking to be passed like a torch from generation to generation, providing the fuel, the research and the inspiration to create constant improvement forever in every field of endeavor. And they're doing everything it takes to make sure it happens.Are we crazy? Maybe.Come be crazy with us.Roy H. Williams

A brief summary of this episodeNiche marketing was born the day a clear-eyed realist chose to dominate a subcategory when the master category seemed too high a hill to climb. “Instead of trying to become a major retailer of home furniture, I'll become the king of affordable dinettes. Instead of making a run at used cars, I'll dominate used Corvettes instead.”Focused specialization makes sense, and in some circumstances it's exactly the right thing to do. But beware the temptation to think too small. Climbing molehills is easy. And when the time comes to plant your flag on top, you'll find there's already a convenient hole in it for you. Long live the king.But then what have you really got?Early in my consulting career most of my advice centered around the idea of focusing on a niche, a subcategory, a genre. My first client was a jeweler who deeply loved rubies, emeralds, sapphires, tourmalines, kunzites, garnets and all manner of colored gemstones. Even better, he was a nationally recognized expert on them. So what better strategy could I recommend than suggest that his store specialize in colored gems? Thank God he didn't agree to it. If Woody Justice had taken my advice that day, he would have quickly become King of a Molehill instead of spending a delightful two decades becoming something much bigger than either of us dared dream.Sad it is to live your whole life without ever having a dream, a hope, a goal. Sadder still is to have a goal, but never achieve it. But saddest of all is to have a goal, achieve it, and then have nothing to do.I'm not being poetic or playing with double meanings. I mean exactly what I said. But I'm not the first, John Steinbeck said it this way: “In the dark the other night I wrote in my head a whole dialogue between St. George and the Dragon. Very close relatives those two. They are eternally tied together – actually two parts of one whole… So St. George must always kill the dragon and it must be repeated because if the dragon were finally killed, there would be no St. George – only a lonely man looking for something to do.”In the year 410, the man in North Africa who would be remembered as St. Augustine of Hippo wrote, “Why does it say in the holy Psalm, 'The hearts of them shall rejoice that seek the Lord, that seek His face forever?' Why does it not say, 'The hearts of them shall rejoice that find the Lord?'” Augustine ponders this awhile, then offers us his conclusion: “Things incomprehensible must be so investigated.” In other words, Augustine believed we are magnetically drawn and thrilled by what is too big for us. It makes our hearts rejoice.I think I agree. And that's why next week I'm going to share with you a dream too big for me alone. Heck, maybe it's too big for all of us together. But it makes my heart rejoice and it may do the same for you.We'll see.Roy H. Williams

I was writing an upbeat and instructional memo to send you today called Confidence: Where to Get It and How to Keep It. But it's going to have to wait. This other thing just wouldn't turn me loose until I wrote it down and sent it to you.Have you ever had a concept slap you in the face with every twist of your consciousness? The slap-fest began for me on Friday, when my chief media buyer asked to have a long discussion with me about television. Juan Guillermo Tornoe rarely requests my time. We had a long heart-to-heart about TV ads and then went home for the weekend.Upon checking my email that evening I learned that FCC chairman Michael Powell – the man who had tried to deregulate TV and radio so that a tiny handful of people could control what we see and hear – had finally stepped down. I slept a little more peacefully that night.I awoke the next morning, hopped into my truck to run some errands and stuck a new CD into the player, having no idea what to expect. I'd not heard of the group Green Day, but bought the CD impulsively when Amazon.com had suggested it. I had no idea what sort of music to expect. Here are the lyrics to the first song:“Don't wanna be an American idiot.One nation controlled by the media.Information age of hysteria.It's calling out to idiot America…”Again the pervasiveness of TV had popped up like a prairie dog the moment I lifted my glance to the horizon.Upon my arrival home the rotating quote that greeted me when I logged on to wizardacademy.org was, “All television is educational television. The question is what is it teaching?” – Nicholas JohnsonMore than 700 rotating quotes and that's the one I get. Hmm…Just then Pennie, having no idea how often I'd already been confronted with the idea of television's pervasive place in our lives, hung up the phone and mentioned that her sister called to say she felt Dr. James Dobson had finally stepped over the line into the land of the paranoid with his accusation that TV's SpongeBob Squarepants is teaching young children to be homosexuals.I wasn't much interested in the squabble between JamesDob and SpongeBob. The thing that snagged my attention is that Pennie and her sister had been discussing a TV newscast that reported what a media minister had said another TV show might be doing to children.The next morning Pennie handed me the newspaper's Parade insert because the cover story was an article by literary giant Norman Mailer. I don't ever read the paper, so when the Princess finds something in it she thinks I might want to see, she saves it for me. You guessed it. The great Norman Mailer was railing against TV. “If the desire to read diminishes, so does one's ability to read. The search for a culprit does not have to go far… If we want to have the best of all possible worlds, I believe that television commercials have got to go. The constant interruption of concentration of TV advertising not only dominates much of our lives, but over the long run is bound to bleed into our prosperity… Let us pay directly for what we enjoy on television rather than pass the spiritual cost on to our children and their children.”Halfway through Mailer's rant my email dinged for my attention. It was a note from a friend I'd not heard from in awhile. There's no way Dan knew what I was pondering. I swear I'm not making any of this up. Here's his email:“Two years ago I watched my last local TV newscast. I was fed up with hearing about murder after murder. I was beginning to believe, as many viewers must, that our society was out of control, with everyone shooting everyone on every street corner. It's not true. Not even close. I feel better about my country since I turned off the local news, which is really “crime news.” You know. . . “if it bleeds, it leads.” But, sadly, a lot of people seem to accept the idea that being informed about a murder across town is relevant and somehow important to know. It's not. It's mind poison.” – Excerpt from RV Travel, Issue 144, EDITOR'S CORNER by Chuck WoodburyWhat do all these disjointed thoughts add up to? Only this: television's magnetic hold on us seems to be on the mind of a lot of people right now. And I, for one, am going to ponder this awhile and come to some sort of conclusion. And then I'll probably take some sort of action. What it will be, I have no idea.There's room in this think-tank for you, too, if you want to jump in.See you in the deep end.Yours,Roy H. Williams

It was Christmas Eve, 1513. In just two more years, 78 year-old architect Giovanni Giocondo would be dead, having filled Europe with magnificent buildings and bridges that continue to stand unweathered in the year 2005. During that night he wrote a note to his friend, Allagia Aldobrandeschi. The note, like his other work, remains:I am your friend and my love for you goes deep. There is nothing I can give you which you have not got, but there is much, very much, that, while I cannot give it, you can take.No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today. Take heaven!No peace lies in the future that is not hidden in this present little instant. Take peace!The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach is joy. There is radiance and glory in the darkness could we but see – and to see we have only to look. I beseech you to look!Life is so generous a giver, but we, judging its gifts by the covering, cast them away as ugly, or heavy or hard. Welcome it, grasp it, touch the angel's hand that brings it to you. Everything we call a trial, a sorrow, or a duty, believe me, that angel's hand is there, the gift is there, and the wonder of an overshadowing presence.Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty – beneath its covering – that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven.Courage, then, to claim it, that is all. But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are all pilgrims together, wending through unknown country, home.And so, at this time, I greet you. Not quite as the world sends greetings, but with profound esteem and with the prayer that for you now and forever, the day breaks, and the shadows flee away.I send you these thoughts today because my own mind is cloudy and damp and I need to shout some sunshine in. I've been crowded upon by too many fast people in wraparound sunglasses and leather pants, each with a crocodile smile and a toothy proposal they assured me would be “mutually beneficial.” It took me long to make them go away.Like Giocondo, I want to build things that will stand the test of time. Businesses for my clients and their families. An academy of higher learning for the world. A true and lasting friendship with you, even though we may never meet except through these brief notes on Monday mornings.Thank you for spending these minutes. My greatest wish is for you to have the strength to lay your hand upon those things Giocondo urged Aldobrandeschi to take.Yours,Roy H. Williams

Which do you think would work better, the brilliant execution of a flawed strategy, or the flawed execution of a brilliant one?In business, it's the flawed execution of a brilliant strategy that usually wins the day.Most advertising professionals are unwilling to question a client's strategy because they're afraid of losing the account. So they happily pretend that “good writing, scientifically selected colors, powerful pictures and reaching the right audience” is all that's needed to make money in America.Piffle and Pooh. Give me average writing, bland colors, no pictures, the wrong people and a strong strategy and I'll have to rent a trailer to haul my money to the bank.It's hard to tell a powerful story badly. But it's easy to tell a weak story well. I've never seen a business fail because they were “reaching the wrong people.” But I've seen thousands fail because they were saying the wrong thing. Please hear me correctly. These catastrophic failures weren't saying the right thing badly, they were saying the wrong thing well. It's amazing how many people become “the right people” when you're saying the right thing. Believe it or not it's advertising third, customer delight second, strategy always first.At the heart of every moneymaking ad campaign is a powerful strategy, a story that needed to be told. But not every business has such a story. When your ads aren't working, return to the core, look at first causes, heal the central wound. No writer, no matter how brilliant, can dress up a bad idea and sell it to intelligent people. It usually takes more than good writing to pull you back from the brink of disaster.How did you get to the brink of disaster in the first place?Business owners wander near the brink when they:(1.) fail to have an attractive core strategy.(2.) pretend their competitors don't matter.(3.) believe that “reaching the right people” is the secret to success.(4.) worry about “increasing traffic” more than delivering a wonderful customer experience.Give me a business that delights its customers and I can write ads that will take them to the stars. But force me to write ads for a business that does only an average job with their customers and I'll have to work like a madman to keep that business from sliding backwards. Unless they have no competitors.I'm amazed by business owners who assume that every successful business deserves to be successful. The truth is that a business with weak competitors is going to succeed no matter how bad their advertising or how consistently they disappoint their customers. Could good advertising save a bad restaurant? No, but these restaurants succeed in spite of bad food and no advertising when they're the only restaurant in the hotel. Strategy triumphs again.Roy H. Williams

“You've heard that before you die, your whole life flashes before your eyes? This is true. It's called living.”I'd love to take credit for that line, but I lifted it from an obscure novel by Terry Pratchett. It's one of the 716 random quotes that magically appear, like a secret message in your alphabet soup, each time you visit wizardacademy.org. Most of these quotes you won't find anywhere else because I don't take them from quote books or compilations, but from strange and interesting places. And from even stranger and more interesting people.Like David Freeman. When David came to waste a day with me recently, he said, “The goal of life is to take everything that made you weird as a kid and get people to pay you money for it when you're older.” When a friend says something like that, I always write it down. Like the time Alex Benningfield said over a glass of wine, “Success is not spontaneous combustion. You've got to set yourself on fire.”And then there are the phrases I'm told someone else “is always saying.” Like when Pierre Basson mentioned that his wife often says, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.” Or when Mordecai Silber told me how his father shared this bit of wisdom with him after Morty told him how well his new business was doing: “During a company's growth phase, additional costs that are incurred because of the growth are variable costs. However, when sales begin to decline, all those variable costs miraculously become fixed costs.”That's exactly the kind of thing kids should learn from their fathers. My kids learned from me how to scribble down quotes from characters in television shows: “Life is like a train. It's bearing down on you and guess what? It's going to hit you. So you can either start running when it's far off in the distance, or you can pull up a chair, crack open a beer, and just watch it come.” – Eric Forman, on That 70s Show.A few of my quotes came from Steve Sorensen, a student and friend who will send you a new Creativity Quote each week if you ask to be added to his list. Last week, Steve's quote was from G.K. Chesterton: “The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul.”More than a dozen were sent to me by my partner, Jeff Eisenberg, another voracious reader of things interesting and obscure. Jeff's most recent email contained this exhortation from James Wood: “Requiring readers to put themselves into the minds of many different kinds of other people is a moral action on the part of the author.”Some of the quotes in my collection are colorful passages I've transcribed from books I've read: “When tourists saw handsome Kelly and ponderous Florsheim, they instinctively loved them, for the Hawaiians reminded them of an age when life was simpler, when laughter was easier, and when there was music in the air.” – James Michener, Hawaii, p.916. “Tunnel vision is a disease in which perception is restricted by ignorance and distorted by vested interest.” – Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker, p.86. And then, of course, there is the immortal wisdom of Calvin and Hobbes: “I'm not in denial. I'm just selective about the reality I choose to accept.”Some of my diamonds were discovered during the weekly archeological dig I call Monday Memo research; like this beauty taken from a letter by poet Edwin Arlington Robinson to literary critic Harry Thurston Peck: “The world is not a prison house, but a kind of kindergarten, where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.” Or this line from the Winchester manuscripts of Thomas Malory, translated by John Steinbeck: “What can I do?' King Arthur cried. 'I see the noblest fellowship in the world crumbling – eroding like a windblown dune. In the hard dark days I prayed and worked and fought for peace. Now I have it and peace is too difficult. Do you know, I find myself wishing for war to solve my difficulties?' 'You are not the first or the last,' said Guinevere.”I'll also confess to 49 quotes I made up; things I heard myself say and then thought, “Gee, I should write that down.” I'm told that one of these was recently added to an online database of quotes from famous people. (I'm betting they confused me with Roy Williams, the famous basketball coach.) It's a line you may remember from a Monday Memo I sent you about a year ago: “Lives, like money, are spent. What are you buying with yours?”And then of course there are the quotes we find as we sail our starships through the online ether: “If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?” – Stephen LevineI'll leave you to ponder that one.Roy H. Williams