Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

When you write ads for a living, you learn that the truth is often the opposite of what people believe.Most people believe an ad will work if people like it, and an ad won’t work if people hate it. But that’s just not true. And we’re wrong about far more important things than that.Take marriage, for instance. You’ve heard it said countless times, “Marriage is just a piece of paper.”But the data clearly indicates otherwise. Not only are unmarried couples more likely to split up than married ones, couples who elope are 12.5x more likely to end up divorced than couples who get married in front of 200 people.That shouldn’t come as a surprise.But this next bit of truth may indeed surprise you:The less you spend on the wedding, the more likely you are to stay married.According to The Knot, the average wedding in America costs about $30,000. But when you look at their methodology and realize The Knot surveyed only those brides who spent a lot of time on their fantasy wedding website and felt inspired to fill out a wedding-cost survey, this “average wedding” figure becomes somewhat suspect. Added to that, The Knot needs its advertisers to believe, “There’s gold in them thar hills.”I’m sure you’ll forgive me for not swallowing the hook.Better data would suggest the average American wedding costs between five and ten thousand dollars.According to Dr. Hugo Mialon and Dr. Andrew Francis of Emory University, if a couple spends 10 to 20 thousand dollars on their wedding, they increase their likelihood of divorce by 29%. Couples who spend more than $20 thousand are 46 percent more likely than average to divorce.When you spend less than average for your wedding, you increase your odds of staying together. Statistically, a couple is 18% less likely than average to get divorced if they spend between 1 thousand and 5 thousand on the wedding. And a couple is 53% less likely than average to get divorced if their wedding costs less than a thousand dollars.Interesting, huh?One last thing: that little factoid that “half of all weddings end in divorce” has never been true. The divorce rate in America has never exceeded 41% and that number is trending downward. In reality, the odds of staying married today are nearly 2 to 1 in your favor.Passion does not create commitment.Commitment creates passion.To whom, and to what, are you committed?Roy H. Williams

Jerry Seinfeld is the richest actor on earth. Google it. He’s worth eight hundred and twenty million dollars.You don’t make that kind of money working as a stand-up comedian in Atlantic City. You make it when companies pay to run ads during your hit TV show. Based on the advertising revenues it generated, Seinfeld (1989-1998) was the most successful TV show in the history of television.Fast-forward to October, 2014: Jerry Seinfeld wins a CLIO, an award that’s sort of like an OSCAR in advertising. (In Greek mythology, Clio was one of the nine Muses and a daughter of Zeus. She was the recorder of great deeds, the proclaimer and celebrator of accomplishments, and a source of inspiration and genius.)Jerry accepted his CLIO award from America’s advertising professionals by stepping up to the microphone and proving once again that you can say vicious things to people as long as you’re smiling when you do it. “I think spending your life trying to dupe innocent people out of hard-won earnings to buy useless, low-quality, misrepresented items and services is an excellent use of your energy.” “I love advertising because I love lying.”Like all great comedians, Seinfeld is funny because he has the audacity to say what everyone else is thinking. It’s been his trademark from the beginning. So no, I’m not bothered that he insulted the people who were honoring him. The average American is probably delighted that he did it. After all, those annoying advertising people had it coming, right?That’s one way to look at it.I prefer to look at it through the eyes of Don Quixote who, you will recall, did some amazing things while pretending he was a man who could do amazing things.Yes, I am a professional ad writer but I believe it to be a worthy profession.America did not become wealthy because of its natural resources. If natural resources determined the wealth of nations, Brazil would be the richest country on earth and Japan would be the poorest.Americans enjoy the most robust economy on earth because we’re incredibly good at selling things to each other. If we ever lose our ability to convince each other to buy things, the American economy will fall apart.So no, I’m not embarrassed to be the guy who convinces you to buy things you don’t need. If Americans bought only what we needed, we would never have progressed beyond kerosene lanterns and a hand-pump in the yard.I am embarrassed by companies who take away your right to choose.I am embarrassed by Marriott. (NYSE: MAR)While Jerry Seinfeld was insulting ad writers, the Federal Communications Commission was fining Marriott $600,000 for using high-tech equipment to jam personal Internet access during a convention at its Nashville hotel. If exhibitors or attendees wanted to go online, they had to pay $250 to $1,000 apiece to Marriott.Teddy Roosevelt spanked J. P. Morgan and the other robber barons of corporate America when they conspired to take away the American right to choose.Teddy wasn’t a Socialist, he was a Republican. He didn’t restrain free trade, open markets, capitalism or the American dream. He restrained powerful men who wanted to abandon seduction in favor of rape.God Bless the FCC.I believe Teddy would be proud.Roy H. Williams

When we think of Romeo and Juliet, we think of Shakespeare. But Shakey didn’t create those characters. The source of Shakespeare’s 1594 play was a 3000-line poem by Arthur Brooke, Romeus and Juliet, published 32 years earlier in 1562.Romeo and Juliet didn’t originate with Arthur Brooke, either. He compiled it from a number of Italian Renaissance sources, the earliest of them going back to 1474, ninety years before Shakespeare was born.Brooke’s tedious treatment of Romeus and Juliet was a moralizing, cautionary tale of a young couple engaged in “lust and whoredom,” whereas Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is a sad misadventure in which heartbroken young lovers die needlessly.Beginning in the 1660s, British productions of Shakespeare’s play allowed Romeo and Juliet to live on, or had Juliet wake up for a simultaneous death with Romeo. Some theatre troupes went so far as to offer the ‘tragic death’ and ‘happily-ever-after’ versions on alternating nights.I’ll bet you didn’t know any of that. I certainly didn’t. I learned it from my friend, Steve King.I spend a few minutes each day with Steve.But I’ve never met him.Steve publishes a daily newsletter called Today in Literature, “the naïve idea of an English teacher on leave from the classroom.”The contact page of his website says, “It is pleasing to think that Today in Literature helps to keep the world of books alive for so many — especially those two subscribers on Bouvet Island in the Antarctic, whoever you may be. I also live on an island— Newfoundland, Canada— where I help raise two children, amuse my wife, and run this cottage industry. It is a one-man operation and it needs your support.”This is me supporting my friend, Steve King. He has no idea I’m doing it.Interestingly, Steve’s little history lesson about Romeo and Juliet contains a valuable business tip that can save you a lot of time and make you a lot of money. This is the tip: whenever possible, repurpose the proven. Streamline and accelerate something that has worked in the past.EXAMPLE: Approach 10 people with fearless faces and ask each of them, “Can you name a movie directed by Oliver Stone in which Charlie Sheen plays a young man who follows a bad father figure, then turns to begin following a good father figure?” Half of them will say Platoon and the other half will say Wall Street.Oliver Stone discovered a winning pattern and he stuck to it, moving the story of Platoon from the green jungle of Viet Nam to the concrete jungle of Wall Street. Each of the films was a towering success.Repurpose the proven. Find a successful pattern and use it as a blueprint.Henry Ford became the world’s first billionaire by turning the overhead disassembly line of Chicago meat packers upside down to create the Detroit assembly line of the Model T. He needed a quick assembly method because he had discovered the miracle question.Sam Walton echoed the miracle question of Henry Ford, “At what price could I sell a huge number of these?” Like Henry before him, Sam became one of the richest men in the world.Steve Jobs followed the lead of Nike Shoes. Instead of focusing his ads on his product, he turned his camera toward the kinds of people who would buy such a product. This little “mirroring” act made him 11 billion dollars.Nike didn’t follow anybody’s lead. They just did it.No, that’s not exactly true. Nike set out to create a fashion statement that indicated an athletic lifestyle, even if the purchaser had no intention of wearing the shoes for the purpose for which they were designed. According to Nike’s own estimate, 80% of that company’s $28 billion in sales this year will be made to people who don’t have an active lifestyle.Abraham Maslow said the greatest unmet need of Americans was our need for a sense of belonging. We hunger for an identity. We buy what we buy to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are. And he chronicled that observation in 1943, 45 years before Nike offered to make athletes of us all.But just as Romeo and Juliet didn’t originate with Shakespeare, the idea that we need constant identity reinforcement didn’t originate with Maslow. In the first chapter of the book of James, we read that a person who hears and understands but takes no action, “is like unto a man who sees his natural face in a mirror: he sees himself, and goes his way, and immediately forgets what manner of man he was.”It appears that Solomon was right. “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.” – Ecclesiastes, chapter 1Gene Fowler says, “The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.”Hey, it worked for Shakespeare.Roy H. Williams

I’ve always been puzzled by the fact that businesspeople think of advertising and sales training and customer service as three separate departments within a company.Have you ever developed an impression of a company through their advertising and then gotten a totally different impression of that company when you met them?The external personality of your company is created through your ads. This is what’s perceived by the general public.The internal personality of your company is created by management. This is what your customers encounter when they contact you.If you delegate the creation of your advertising to an outside group but give them no input into your sales training and customer service programs, you’ll create a company with a split personality every time.Are people in your company using those words and phrases created and popularized by your ad writers? Or do they start an altogether new and different conversation with your customer full of new and different words and phrases?That’s a really bad idea.Continue the conversation that was begun in your ads and you’ll see your close rate rise significantly.Each of us has a natural connection with 3 of every 10 people we meet.Another 3 aren’t going to like you regardless of what you do or say. This disconnection isn’t your fault, so don’t let it bother you. The remaining 4 people can possibly be sold, but only if you do and say the right things.Does it surprise you that when all categories of selling are combined, the national average close rate is about 20 percent?Let’s say your staff is well above average with a close rate of 30 percent. This means they’re selling 3 out of 10 opportunities. That’s 50% more than the 2 out of 10 everyone else is selling.Even so, what if we could sell just 1 of the 4 remaining “sellable” customers?Your sales would immediately increase by 33%.What if we could sell 2 of those 4?Your sales would increase by 67 percent.What if, through clear focus and genuine inspiration, we could sell 3 of those 4?Congratulations. We just doubled your sales volume with no change in pricing, no change in inventory, no change in overhead and – most importantly – no additional sales opportunities.The corporate wall between ad writing and sales training has troubled me for 30 years, but I’ve not spoken publicly about the problem until now.Shall I confess?I didn’t mention it because I didn’t want to be asked to fix it.Fixing it, you see, would involve talking to the employees of all the companies for whom I write ads. And frankly, nothing on earth could be as excruciating for me as having to smile and listen to well-meaning people tell me what they think I should do differently.Truth be told, I’m not really a people person. Few writers are.But a few months ago it occurred to me: I don’t have to have those conversations myself. I have dozens of partners and thousands of students who are much better with people than I am.One of my partners, Tim Miles, has written extensively in recent months about how to keep your company from becoming schizophrenic. And Tim is a real people person. Bestselling authors Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg have addressed the problem in a new “executive storyteller’s guide” that’s scheduled to be released next month. The Fortune 500 companies that were given advance copies and implemented the advice have responded with enthusiastic reviews. Another partner, Ray Seggern, has put together a marvelous workshop to help you repair the split in your corporate personality.According to Seggern,1. Story is What You Say (external message created through advertising)2. Culture is Who You Are (internal reality created by sales training)3. Experience is What You Deliver (what happens to your customers when they choose to trust you)If any of these 3 is out of alignment, there will be predictable side effects.When story and experience don’t align, you get bad reviews.But when your advertising aligns with your customer’s experience, you have authenticity.When culture and experience don’t align, you have cancer in the building.But when your corporate culture aligns with your customer’s experience, you have employees with high morale.When culture and story don’t align, you have a close rate that’s unimpressive.Get your sales training aligned with your advertising and you’ll need a wheelbarrow to carry your money.2015 is going to be a very good year for business.Roy H. Williams

Jeffrey Eisenberg sent me this 1994 Compuserve ad that talks about delivering “up to 60 messages per month” as though 60 would be the largest number of emails that any of us would ever need to send.Isn’t it interesting how our use of technology always seems to evolve differently than any of us expected to see happen? Yet we continue to be attracted to pitchmen with booming voices and bad toupees who claim to be able to tell us how we’ll use technology in the future.In 1978, Fed-X was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1983, they became the first U.S. company to reach revenues of $1 billion without merger or acquisition. Then when FAX machines became popular, everyone predicted the immediate decline of Fed-X. After all, why would anyone spend ten dollars to send documents overnight when you could send those same documents in a matter of seconds for the price of a long-distance phone call?Fed-X revenues will be about $46 billion in 2014.Not many years prior to 1978, the introduction of electric toasters, gas-powered lawnmowers, self-correcting typewriters, microwave ovens and other “labor saving devices” had the experts convinced that boredom would soon be the biggest problem facing modern Americans. How were we going to spend all that leisure time?No one – absolutely no one – predicted that we would simply accelerate the pace of living, cramming more productivity into each waking hour until we were frazzled and breathless and had to look at our driver’s licenses to remember who we were.We used to tell ourselves that we could become anything we wanted to be. But today we tell ourselves we can become everything we want to be.We’re living multiple lives simultaneously.As a consultant, people ask me to predict the future of advertising. They look at the fragmentation of mass media and the rise of digital technology and ask, “What’s the next big thing?”The only thing I know for sure about the future is that it will happen. But rather than dodge the “What’s next?” question, I’ll give you my best guesses. (You should set an alarm on your phone to remind you 6 years from today to compare my predictions to the realities of September, 2020. We’ll probably both get a big laugh out of it.)1. Audiences will continue to get smaller, but ad rates will increase.2. Micro-targeting will become increasingly popular as predictive modeling through Big Data promises advertisers that they can reach “exactly the right customer at exactly the right moment.”3. Excited by the promise of predictive modeling, most advertisers will continue to focus their efforts on finding the right customer to sell instead of finding the right message to deliver.4. The big rewards will go to advertisers who find the right message to deliver.5. Savvy advertisers will use the Post Office to deliver warm messages to prospective customers for the price of a first-class postage stamp. The most successful of these will be hand-addressed, original greeting cards in numbered editions.6. No, I wasn’t joking about #5 above. I actually believe direct-mail is going to make a come-back, but this time around it will wear better clothes and have a lot more class.7. Broadcast radio (AM/FM) will continue to offer great value to advertisers for at least a while longer. Internet radio continues to erode Broadcast radio, though more slowly than most people assume. The most reliable projections indicate it will be about 8 more years (2022) before Internet radio is as large as Broadcast radio.Indiana Beagle has more details about all of this in the rabbit hole. To enter the rabbit hole, just click the fish in the Compuserve ad at the top of the page. Each click of an image in the rabbit hole will take you one page deeper.Welcome to Wonderland, Alice.Roy H. Williams

Before becoming a poet, a Wizard of AdsTM and a writing instructor, Peter Nevland was an engineer at Motorola.Andrew Backus is a geologist and the living embodiment of Doctor Doolittle. The number of injured animals Andrew has rescued from the roadside would overflow the San Diego Zoo. Andrew and Peter are both cognoscenti graduates of The Magical Worlds Communications Workshop.When I saw Peter talking to Andrew I walked over to where they were standing. This was going to be interesting.Peter looked at me and said, “What makes one storyteller more interesting than another?”Not sure where this was headed, I asked, “Are you asking, or are you about to tell me?Peter said, “I’ve developed algorithms* to help me grade the writing assignments of my students, but I haven’t been able to reverse engineer what makes the basic structure of a story interesting.”I said, “Ahhh. Architecture. So you’re asking, then?”Peter nodded, so I continued. “Stories become interesting when highly divergent components converge. Predictable stories are built from elements with too few degrees of separation between them. That’s what makes the narrative arc (the plot) of those stories feel linear; the listener can easily guess what’s going to happen next. Good storytellers begin with a high degree of separation between the elements in their stories, thereby increasing the listener’s surprise and delight when those elements converge.”Andrew said, “Can you give me an example?”I decided to use a technique called Random Entry that I learned from Mark Fox, one of the instructors at Wizard Academy.**I said, “I want each of you to think back over the past 24 hours and focus on something that has occupied your attention for a period of time, something you felt to be interesting and worthwhile.” A minute later Andrew said, “I’ve got something,” and Peter said, “Me, too.”I looked toward Andrew and he told me about Zoysia grass. “Not only will it grow in dry climates, but it will also grow in the shade.”Peter spoke of a pattern in Psalm 15 that is broken – intentionally, Peter believes – to dramatically emphasize the unique nature of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.I said, “You will agree that those two ideas are highly divergent from one another?”Both of them smiled and nodded.I then told them the story of how God is like Zoysia grass.One of my literary heroes, Tom Robbins, says, “Everything in the universe is connected, of course: it’s a matter of using imagination and research to discover the links and using language to expand and enliven them.”I did the “research” Tom Robbins speaks about as I listened to Andrew and Peter. The key to this research is to probe for the defining characteristics of each story until you’ve clearly identified components within the two stories that can be linked. These are your points of connection. All that remained for me, then, was to build a bridge between Andrew’s tale of Zoysia grass and Peter’s tale of Psalm 15. The points of connection make it possible.Building the bridge is easier than you would think. The points of connection are always there. I know it sounds crazy but, “Everything in the universe is connected, of course.”I continued my explanation to Andrew and Peter. “The bridge that connects highly divergent ideas is like the flow of electric current. It’s powerful and illuminating and it always feels like magic.” * * *Andrew said, “So the bridge is like a third gravitating body?”“Not quite,” I answered. We won’t have a true, third gravitating body until we find a third idea that’s as divergent from Zoysia Grass and the God of Israel as those two ideas are from each other. When a single bridge unites three highly divergent components, you have a tool that will gain and hold the attention of the masses.”If anyone can build that into an algorithm, Peter can.I’m interested in seeing how this turns out, aren’t you?Roy H. Williams* In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is a step-by-step procedure for calculations. Algorithms are used for calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning. – WIKIPEDIA** Mark teaches Da Vinci and the 40 Answers twice a year and Systematic Idea Generation when he’s in the mood.* * * We discuss the electricity that flows from the two poles of a duality when they are brought into close proximity in “Sinatra’s Riddle,” the Monday Morning Memo for July 7, 2014.

Some of you are going to feel like I’ve spit on your shoe or mocked your religion or told you that your baby is ugly, so I’d like to apologize in advance for what I’m about to say.Teamwork in business is highly overrated.There, I’ve said it.I realize those 6 words are going to disturb some of you, but if my goals were merely to buy an arched eyebrow and a scornful frown and trigger an email of rebuttal, I would be just another sensationalist trying to yank a reaction from his audience.But those are not my goals.My goals are to make you more productive, help you reduce your mistakes, shorten your learning curve and raise the height of your success.To do these things, we must look at what’s hiding in your blind spot.I appreciate that you’re still reading.I was at lunch recently with 3 incredibly bright businesspeoplewhen I smiled cheerfully at them and said, “I think teamwork in business is highly overrated.”All three of them stiffened as though I had said something truly shameful. After a moment, the business owner sitting directly across from me looked down at his plate and said quietly, “Well, you’re entitled to your opinion.”We had not been talking about teamwork. There was no reason for any of these people to feel personally challenged or attacked, yet that’s exactly how they reacted. The cultural myth of Teamwork is anchored deep within the American soul, beginning, I believe, with Thomas Jefferson and “We the People” and the launch of this grand experiment called Democracy.I spent the next hour swatting down every example of successful “teamwork” they could throw at me. At the end of that hour they universally agreed that “teamwork” is an illusion created when the individual components within a human system accomplish a goal that is credited to the collective, rather than to the individual efforts of the components.What might appear to be teamwork in a relay race is, in truth, just a series of individual runners, each of whom begins their effort with an advantage or a deficit that was handed to them by the previous runner. If a runner increases that advantage or shortens that deficit, he or she was successful. It is only when they are rewarded collectively that we create the illusion of a team.Individual responsibility brings out the best in us.If you remove individual responsibility, you create a committee.Every bureaucracy begins as a well-intentioned committee.Leaders and managers have different functions.A leader encourages the members of a tribe to deliver their best individual efforts. A manager holds each individual responsible for delivering the outcome that he or she has been assigned.Steve Jobs did not invent the Apple computer.Steve Wozniak invented the Apple computer.Although I admire the abilities of Steve Jobs, he was merely the popularizer, the face, the dynamic leader, the pitchman, the philosopher, the high priest of the Apple religion. Without Wozniak, Steve Jobs would likely have been just another California techie bouncing from company to company in sneakers and ripped blue jeans.Wozniak said, “Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me … they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone …. I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”John Steinbeck said something similar in 1952, when Wozniak was just 2 years old. “Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.”The great David Ogilvy made a similar observation when Wozniak was in high school. “Much of the messy advertising you see on television today is the product of committees. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they should never be allowed to create them.”I believe committees are formed when no one wants to accept individual responsibility for the outcome. I believe this is also the motive that lurks behind our current fascination with “big data.”“Big data has become the X factor of modern marketing, the hero of every marketer’s story. But it’s a promise at risk of letting you down. You may be thinking that data will magically turn bush-league marketing into a winning ‘Moneyball’ performance. But that’s an artifact of our big data obsession. Data, alone, isn’t what makes marketing move the needle for business.”“Data can play a leading role in developing strategy and bringing precision to execution, but it does nothing — absolutely nothing — to stir motivation and create the desire that makes cash registers ring. Data is important, but it’s content that makes an emotional connection.”– Harvard Business Review, February 25, 2014, “What Data-Obsessed Marketers Don’t Understand,” by Jake Sorofman and Andrew FrankThere are things that can exist only in the heart of an individual. Among these are commitment, determination, resourcefulness, intelligence and pride. These may appear to exist in a group, but in truth they can exist only in each of its individuals.So now we understand the importance of leadership.The values, beliefs and culture of a tribe are personified by its leaders.Steve Jobs was a tribal leader, as were Thomas Jefferson, Mahatma Gandhi and Adolph Hitler.Not all leaders are wise and good.“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”– Friedrich NietzscheTeamwork is never the answer. Individual work is the answer.We love teams because we love to be members of a tribe.I embrace the attraction of belonging to a tribe because I know the power of culture and values and beliefs. Being part of a team, a tribe, gives us a sense of identity, purpose and adventure. And that helps us to perform as individuals.Teamwork is overvalued in America because Americans love football.But it isn’t the teamwork that attracts us.It is the tribalismPersonally, I agree with George F. Will, who said, “Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.”Uh-oh. Did I slap your baby again?Roy H. Williams

Targeting is impotent.That wasn’t a misspelling.If you want to waste a lot of money on advertising, just target exactly the right audience and then make an offer that fails to move them.Targeting isn’t the answer.Having the right message is the answer.Most ads underperform because they say, “Here’s what we do and here’s how we do it. You should buy it.” Tedious and predictable ads always talk about what and how. But if you want to engage the imagination, you’ve got to start talking about why.Ads that change hearts and minds say, “This is the belief that wakes us up in the morning. It’s why we come together. Here’s how we live our belief. Do you believe what we believe?”The selling of products and services is the selling of ideas.And now you know how Apple became the 5th largest company in America.According to Simon Sinek, most computer companies say, “We make great computers. They’re beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. Want to buy one?” That’s how most of us communicate in our ads. We say what we do and how we’re different and better than our competitors. What and how are always boring. But Apple begins by telling us why they do what they do.Apple says, “We believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. We just happen to make great computers. Want to buy one?” In other words, Apple sells you their belief system before they try to sell you their computer.Apple generated $43.7 billion in sales during the first three months of 2014. That’s more than Google, Amazon, and Facebook COMBINED. Apple’s iPhone revenue alone is bigger than Microsoft and their iPad revenue alone is bigger than Facebook. And those are just two of their products. We haven’t even touched laptops or iTunes or Beats by Dre.In his TED talk, How Great Leaders Inspire Action, Simon Sinek says,“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. If you don’t know why you do what you do, and people respond to why you do what you do, then how will you ever get people to vote for you, or buy something from you, or, more importantly, be loyal and want to be a part of what it is that you do? Again, the goal is not just to sell to people who need what you have; the goal is to sell to people who believe what you believe. The goal is not just to hire people who need a job; it’s to hire people who believe what you believe. If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money, but if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.”“Dr. King wasn’t the only man in America who was a great orator. He wasn’t the only man in America who suffered in a pre-civil rights America. In fact, some of his ideas were bad. But he had a gift. He didn’t go around telling people what needed to change in America. He went around and told people what he believed. ‘I believe, I believe, I believe,’ he told people. And people who believed what he believed took his cause, and they made it their own, and they told people. And lo and behold, 250,000 people showed up on the right day at the right time to hear him speak.”“How many of them showed up for him? Zero. They showed up for themselves. And it wasn’t about black versus white: 25 percent of the audience was white. We followed, not for him, but for ourselves. And, by the way, he gave the ‘I have a dream’ speech, not the ‘I have a plan’ speech.”Simon Sinek speaks of leadershipbut his principles apply equally well to advertising.Great ads – like great leaders – tell you why, not just what and how.Indy will post a couple of examples from Apple in today’s rabbit hole and I’ll explore an hour’s worth of examples during next week’s session of Wizard of Ads LIVE. “Speaking to Why” is also a new module in Brandable Chunks, the workshop taught by Jeff Sexton and Chris Maddock and me at Wizard Academy.Communication is what happens when you cause another person to see what you see. Persuasion is what happens when you cause another person to believe what you believe.When you have a plan and people reluctantly agree to it, you’re doomed. But when you have a belief – when you have a dream – you’ll find it to be highly contagious. People will take ownership of that dream and make it their own. What do you believe that might echo in the hearts of your customers? What difference do you dream of making in their lives?Put that in your ads.Let the magic begin.Roy H. Williams

If you were to ask 1000 people to name the behavior that marks93 percent of all successful companies, what do you suppose they would tell you?I didn’t ask 1000 people but I did ask Google, which is sort of like asking the whole world. Here’s what the whole world told me:“Successful companies focus on what they do best.”“They invest in their people.”“They’re passionate.”“They anticipate the future and stay ahead of the curve.”“They never quit learning.”“They have discipline and a financial roadmap.”“Blah, blah, blah.”I was staring at a list of 86 different characteristics when the truth finally hit me: “Half of these people are guessing and the other half are just preaching a sermon about their personal values and core beliefs. Not a single one of these writers has actually gathered the facts.”Then I stumbled onto a book review written by Eric Barker of Time magazine.Amar Bhidé went to Harvard, became a proprietary trader for E.F. Hutton, a consultant for McKinsey and Company, and then a college professor and a world authority on capitalism. In his third book, The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses (Oxford University Press,) Bhidé brought all the rigor of academia to his investigation of the characteristics of successful companies.God bless Amar Bhidé.What he found was that 93 percent of all successful companies had to abandon their original business plan — because the original plan proved not to be viable. “In other words,” wrote Eric Barker of Time, “successful companies don’t succeed because they have the right strategy at the beginning; but rather, because they have money left over after the original strategy fails, so that they can pivot and try another approach.”Mary Whaley summarizes Bhidé’s book by saying the winners in business “survive and prosper because of an ongoing ability to adapt to opportunities and problems, are subjected to many detours, and stumble often along the way.”Successful companies have an ability to improvise.Unsuccessful companies blindly “stick to the plan.”The principal difference between hope and a planis presumption about the future.The intended plan is deliberate.The improvised plan is emergent.According to Eric Barker, “Deliberate is what’s in the business plan, the PowerPoint deck, the list of goals. And that’s what ends up changing 93% of the time. Emergent is what you find along the way. It’s when your baby nephew ignores the gift you bought him… but LOVES the shiny wrapping paper. The heart medication research… that ends up becoming Viagra.”“Intel’s decision to accept an order from Busicom, a second-tier Japanese calculator company, started the company on its path to microprocessors. Sam Walton’s decision to build his second store in another small town near his first one in Bentonville, Arkansas rather than in a large city, led to Wal-Mart’s discovery of the attractive economics of building pre-emptively large stores in small towns.”– The Processes of Strategy Development and Implementation,Clayton Christensen and Tara DonovanNovelist E.L. Doctorow once said, “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” The same thing is true of running a business.There’s a line in Psalm 119 in which the writer says to God, “Your word is a lamp unto my feet, a light unto my path.” When I was a very young boy, one of my teachers pointed out that a footlamp provides only enough light to see the next step. You can’t see further until you’ve moved forward in the light that you have.I’m betting E.L. Doctorow has read that verse.One step at a time.And when something unexpectedappears in the light, always be ready to improvise.Roy H. WilliamsPS – When I asked Princess Pennie to proofread this memo before I sent it, she read it carefully, then look at me and smiled, “Even God had Plan B.” – RHW

Thirty-one years ago, David Ogilvy wrote, “In some developing countries radio still reaches more people than television. Yet even there nobody really knows what kind of commercials make the cash register ring. Isn’t it time somebody tried to find out?”– David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1983, p. 116Sleep well, David. We found out. And by “we,” I mean the Wizard of Ads partners.As Indy points out in the illustration above the title of today’s memo, opening with a pop culture reference from 50 years ago followed by a quote from a man that’s been dead for 15 years could easily lead you to believe I’m a dinosaur left over from that bygone era when cars still ran on gasoline.Would I point out how old and potentially out-of-touch I am if I didn’t have complete confidence in what I’m about to say?A lot of business people are listening to their kids right now and getting all lathered up in the belief that the Internet has made TV and radio ads obsolete. In fact, I just received an email from a client in Syracuse who is positively fretting about the future of radio. What makes his email especially funny is that we’ve been using radio exclusively for the last 3 years and it’s made him so wildly successful that he’s currently expanding into cities nationwide.I believe in the web. In fact, I’m using it to deliver this message to you.The Internet killed the yellow pages, the newspaper and encyclopedias and now it’s revolutionizing the distribution of books and music. Born in 2005, YouTube has become a magnificent lottery that doesn’t pay its winners in cash, but with worldwide recognition and a few weeks of fame.I may be YouTube’s biggest fan. I am enthralled by it.Have you ever bought any pay-per-click ads? Shortly after Google announced their AdWords program I spent more than $100,000 of my own money just to learn what does and doesn’t work. My only goal was to get a hands-on education. I didn’t want to risk my clients’ dollars until I knew exactly what I was doing.In the end, I figured out how to drive qualified traffic to a target website for just a nickel a click. But that seemed expensive to me, so I abandoned it.The average 30 or 60-second radio ad needs to be heard by the same person 3 times within 7 nights sleep. This currently costs my clients less than 2 cents per week. In some cities, that 3-frequency costs us only about a penny a week. We can do the same for you if you want.When I talk about mass media, young advertising people often look at me with pity and scorn. I can almost feel them patting me on my head.That’s why I got such a kick out of watching a YouTube video of Bob Hoffman speaking at an advertising conference in Europe:“One of the problems with our advertising experts is that they have a free pass. They go around to conferences. They talk to the press. They write stupid blogs. And they make profound statements, and confident statements about our industry. And no one ever goes back and checks up on them… We begin our little journey in 2004, about 10 years ago… Seth Godin, the bestselling guru of marketing said, ‘We have reached the end of traditional advertising.’ He apparently forgot to tell Toyota and Coke and McDonald’s. Then Advertising Age, the top advertising trade publication in The States, said, ‘The post-advertising age is underway.’ Bob Garfield, a columnist at Advertising Age, said in 2009, ‘The present is apocalyptic. Any hope for a seamless transition, or any transition at all, from mass media and marketing to micro-media and marketing are absurd. The sky is falling. We are exquisitely, irretrievably, fucked.’ Bob is a nice guy but I really think he needs a hug. And according to the nonprofit think-tank, FutureLab, they just came out and said it, ‘Advertising is dead.'”“Another of the fairy tales of the advertising industry was that ‘interactivity’ was going to make advertising more engaging and effective. Interactive advertising was going to ‘disrupt’ the old forms of advertising and make them obsolete… It turns out that people have no interest whatsoever in interacting with advertising. In fact, online banner ads have a click-through rate lower than one in a thousand. This is not interactivity. This is absence of interactivity. The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from ads was going to joyfully click her remote to interact with them is going to go down as one of the all-time great advertising delusions.”When David Ogilvy died in 1983, I was a 25-year old radio executive about to be handed a 100,000-watt FM signal and a staff of 32 people in a city of a million. The ads I wrote were so productive that business owners all over the city wanted to buy advertising from me. So in what might be the world’s best example of The Peter Principle personified, I was promoted to General Manager. In effect, my network traded their top salesman and best ad writer for the worst General Manager ever to sit behind a desk.I was so miserable that I quit a year later to become a freelance consultant. But I didn’t poach clients from my radio station. In fact, I refused to work with anyone in the town or region where I lived.There were 2 kinds of ad agencies. The big ones bought network ads for national clients. The little ones bought local ads for local clients in a single town or region. So I decided to invent a third category; I would work with local businesses nationwide, excluding only the region in which I lived.It took barely 3 decades for me to spend a billion dollars of other people’s money on a never-ending series of experiments in advertising.A billion is a thousand million. You already knew that. But I like to say it because I’ve never quite been able to wrap my brain around it. A billion dollars allowed me to try every experiment I could think of multiple times.There’s nothing we haven’t done. It turns out you can learn a lot with a billion dollars.I’m telling you all this to build my credibility. I need to do that so you won’t smugly dismiss what I’m about to say:Mass media is still the best way to grow a local business.This may change in the future, but right now the best return on investment for local businesses still comes from TV and radio and billboards.Make no mistake: you absolutely need a website and it has to be a good one. Your customers are probably going to visit it before they contact you. But a website isn’t advertising. A website is a crazy high-tech answering machine that can answer every conceivable question your customer might ask. But you still have to get that customer to call.This is probably where you should quit reading, because I’m about to start doing a lot of strutting and chest-thumping. It could get pretty ugly. In fact, give me a tall furry hat and a glittering baton I could be the drum major in a marching band.One of the reasons I invented the Wizard of Ads business model is because I felt the traditional ad agency model pitted the agency and the client against each other. In the traditional model, the more you spend, the more they make, so they always want you to spend more.In our business model, the more you grow, the more we make.My first book, The Wizard of Ads, became business book of the year. My second book became the Wall Street Journal’s #1 business book in America and a New York Times bestseller. When my third book hit the bestseller list, I began recruiting the brightest young talent I could find and making them my partners. A few dozen of us are now scattered across the US, Canada and Australia.Every Wizard of Ads is paid an up-front fee to investigate the market potential, identify your strengths and weaknesses, develop a style guide and a copy Bible, plan and negotiate a 1-year ad schedule, and then write the initial ads for a long-term campaign employing whatever media makes the most sense. We do mostly TV and radio although we also post a lot of billboards and write some email campaigns as well.That up-front fee can range from $5,000 for a tiny company with big growth potential to as much as $350,000 for a huge company that’s trying to fend off a pack of hungry competitors. Following the development of the launch plan, we create new ads each month and renegotiate the media once a year for a modest monthly salary that is adjusted annually – up or down – by the same percentage that your top-line revenues have grown or declined.We don’t make more money unless you make more money.My original goal, obviously, was to find small companies ($1,000,000 a year in sales) that had the potential to grow 5x to 50x their current size. I began my business 30 years ago with 12 companies that paid me $500 a month. Each of them did less than a million dollars a year in total business. Some of those companies now do tens of millions a year and pay me more than $100,000 apiece.Andrew Harrison is a brightly talented young man who wanted to work for me so badly that he agreed to answer my telephones just to get his foot in the door. He answered my phones faithfully without a word of encouragement from me for more than 12 months before I hooked him up with a small client so that he could make a few extra dollars. Andrew still answers my phones, but I’m growing him into a stallion of advertising.Last week I told Andrew that he could pick up 2 more little clients at $5,000 up front plus $500 a month for the first year. When you consider those are the amounts I was charging new clients 30 years ago, you’ll see that I’m making Andrew learn the value of starting small and growing with the client. The telephone Andrew answers is (512) 295-5700.If you’re too big for Andrew to handle, you should go ahead and call. He has an older brother that’s one of the senior writers on my in-house team. Andrew also knows all of my Wizard of Ads partners, many of whom work with companies already doing $10 million to $50 million a year.The prices they charge you will be higher than $5,000 up front and $500 a month, but I’m sure that one of us can quickly get you rolling down a faster track, happily picking up momentum. By the way, I promise not to talk about my business again for another 20 years.Roy H. Williams