Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

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