Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

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

Marketing was easy in the old days. You had ABC, NBC and CBS, a local newspaper and half a dozen radio stations. That was it. There was no Fox, no WB, no cable channels, no FM radio and no such thing as a cell phone. You had to find a phone booth and a dime. When pay phones jumped to a quarter it was taken as a sign of the antichrist.I'm talking about the 1970s.Fax machines and VCRs did not exist for most of us until 1980. It took barely 10 years for them to become utterly indispensable and now they're becoming obsolete, kicked to the curb by email attachments, DVD machines and TiVo.The future is accelerating toward us. Take your eyes off the hurtling horizon – even for a moment – and the world will pass you by.It's time for you to get serious about a web site.Yes, in that list of things that didn't exist in 1980, I failed to mention personal computers, the biggest world-changer of them all.World-changing, let's talk about it.Recently, one of our graduates sat down to dinner at the old Clark Gable estate with 4 other World Changers:1. the president of a major television network2. a recent candidate for the Presidency of the United States3. the man whose name is attached to all the most spectacular hotels in Las Vegas4. a money man whose name you would instantly recognize if I were to say it.They gathered to discuss a project being headed by my friend. I hope to be able to tell you more about this project soon, as it potentially involves Wizard Academy.Another of our graduates is directing the worldwide Research and Development efforts of the US government to defeat bio-terrorism. If he is successful, Anthrax, Ebola, SARS, AIDS and other infectious diseases will no longer be life-threatening. Let's pray that he succeeds.A third graduate is the head of Pentagon News. I'm always fascinated to hear his perspective on world events.But the graduates whose work is most likely to affect your personal life – the ones who can help you catch up to the future – are the Wizards of Web, Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg.You know from recent memos that their book Call to Action became an international bestseller. Now, as a special favor to their alma mater, the Eisenbrothers have agreed to teach a world-changing 2-day event – Sept 8 and 9 – as a fundraiser to help build Engelbrecht House, the student mansion soon to be constructed on the campus of Wizard Academy. (No more renting of hotel rooms when you come to Austin!)You need to attend this event. No other investment will propel you as fast into the future. And at just $2,200 it's the bargain of the century. Academy graduates (and honorary graduates – those who have attended my public seminars) pay only half. Wow. That's only $1,100. Read the details of this one-time-only seminar – Call to Action – under Course Descriptions at wizardacademy.org.I wouldn't put it off if I were you.Roy H. Williams

Sometimes I go to funny places in my mind. Do you ever go exploring?Lately I've been imagining a world without oil. No oil for cars, no oil for 18-wheelers, no oil for jets. Not even any oil for construction equipment or ambulances. Same world, but smack out of oil. Can you see it?The funny thing is that it will happen. When that day comes, we may or may not have harnessed a renewable source of energy, but run out of oil we most certainly will. What will the history books say of you and me?The June 4, 2005 issue of The Economist tells us the Chinese are learning to drive. Last year they purchased more than 5 million cars, compared to the 17 million purchased by Americans. Next year they'll surpass the Japanese to become the second-largest car market on earth. And that's just the beginning. China's rumbling economic growth means that in just a few years she could buy 5 times as many cars as the US each year and consume as much oil as we currently use in half a decade.And you thought the price of gas was high.According to the most recent U.S. Geological Survey (2000,) there are 3,000 billion barrels of oil left in the world. Total oil production in 2000 was 25 billion barrels. So if world oil consumption increases at an average rate of 1.4 percent per year, the world's oil supply will not be exhausted until the year 2056. But that scenario doesn't consider the Chinese. If they punch the accelerator, our fifty-year supply could be gone in fifteen.The internet is looking more and more vital, is it not?I'm not trying to play Chicken Little here, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” My goal today is only to open the eyes of your imagination. There are lots of things to think that aren't being properly thunk, but if we all pitch in, we might be able to think them all. Here are just a few:Did J.M. Barrie intend for Peter Pan's ticking crocodile to represent how Time devours our youth? And if so, how deep does the symbolism run in this 100 year-old story?Jesus always “lifted his eyes toward heaven” when he prayed, so why do we always bow our heads and close our eyes?If color is a language, which colors are the verbs? What constitutes a verb in the language of music?Why do theoretical physicists not take the ideas of Julian Barbour more seriously?If your life ended today, what would you regret you had left undone?Sometimes it's good to go exploring in your mind.You can never be certain what you'll find.Roy H. Williams

Have you ever noticed how unhappy people always want to share their unhappiness with you? It may come in the form of a whine, a complaint, a rant, or sanctimonious “constructive criticism,” but come it most certainly will.The thing to remember when an unhappy person begins spraying unhappiness is this: It's not really about you. It's about them. And the wounds they carry. So try not to internalize it.Do you remember the Jewish father played by Roberto Benigni in Life is Beautiful? He illustrated the idea that happiness can be chosen in spite of unhappy circumstances; you are not a product of your environment. You are a product of your choices.Even weirder than unhappy people wanting to share their unhappiness with you is the fact that happy people generally keep their happiness to themselves. Why are we like this?I have a theory about leaving tips on tables at restaurants: the size of the tip isn't really an expression of your judgment regarding the quality of service you've received. It's an expression of your generosity, the bigness of your heart. It's not really about the waiter or waitress. It's about you.This idea can be especially fun when you receive truly abominable service. That's when you can leave a tip that's totally over the top and then smile all the way to your car as you contemplate all the different ways the story might end:1. The waiter, recognizing the tip as a gesture of love, pulls himself together and has a much-improved day, giving everyone exceptional service. Your ray of sunshine touches 276 lives before it fades into the memory of yesterday.2. The waiter, misinterpreting the tip as proof that it doesn't really matter whether or not he does a good job, continues his slacker attitude and reaps the life of mediocrity he deserves. But sometimes, late at night, he is haunted by the memory of the strange day he received a 20 dollar tip for serving a 7 dollar sandwich. What was that all about?3. The waiter, shamed by the monster tip he knows he didn't deserve, assumes it must have been meant for the cook. Your gift has now triggered a crisis of conscience. Will the waiter pass the tip along to the cook and grow as a human being? Or will he “steal” it and forever know himself to be a thief?4. The waiter, desperately needing the extra cash, accepts the tip as a gift from God. Congratulations, you are now an angel, God's messenger, a finger of His divine hand.5. The waiter, truly stupid, believes he deserves the tip and pockets it with bravado. Let him have his sad moment of glory. There won't be many like it in his life.The bottom line is this: People need love. Especially when they do not deserve it. And in the words of Iome Sylvarresta, “Love isn't something you feel. It's something you give.”Do something good today for a person who has done nothing to deserve it. Better yet, do something good for someone you don't even like.I promise you'll have a better day.Roy H. Williams