Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

I ate too much and it made me heavy and slow.Using too many words is like eating too much.It makes communication heavy and slow.Short sentences hit harder.Nouns and verbs are fists that deliver punches.Adjectives and adverbs are gloves that soften the blows.Unless they are unexpected.A brass-knuckled uppercut is an unexpected adjective that modifies a noun you didn’t see coming.“Your soup tastes like old socks that have been marinated in diesel, sprinkled with urine, and baked for three days covered in a sack that’s been used to wipe a donkey’s backside.”– Richard Poole, Death in Paradise, Season 1, episode 6Soup is the subject.Tastes, marinated, sprinkled, baked, covered, used, and wipe are the verbs.Socks, diesel, urine, days, sack, and backside are the nouns.Unexpected words unleash vivid images when they splash onto your mind.We’re driving through Mike’s Express Car Wash in Indianapolis.A 4,000,000 BTU heater ensures the water never drops below 180 degrees. Hot water cleans better than cold water because it delivers more stored energy.Soap unleashes hungry electrons that dissolve the road film clinging to our car.Pressure pumps give the water kinetic energy as it is fired from the nozzles of the guns.Brushes and mitters deliver mechanical vibration, a fourth kind of energy.The soft-water rinse is chased by a tornado that rocks our car and leaves never a trace of moisture.Emerging from the tunnel, we look like we’re driving off the showroom floor.A well-written paragraph unleashes bright colors like a car wash in Indianapolis.Similes and metaphors allow us to use the known and familiar to reveal the unknown and unfamiliar, like a father telling his son about the birds and the bees.Paired opposites give us the power to shine light in dark places and bring wellsprings of water to thirsty deserts.Rhythms of stressed and unstressed syllables make our words memorable. Meter is music. Meter is magic.Alliteration gives us the ability to accelerate all 43 phonemes, like many mumbling mice making midnight music in the moonlight. Mighty nice.The names of shapes and colors and familiar things allow us to project images onto the movie screen of the mind.Words give us the power to speak worlds into existence.What future will you set in motion today?Roy H. Williams

There is, to my knowledge, only one way to profitably put the power of the internet to work for you.It’s simple; just give people what they want.But first you have to know what they want.Let me help you with that.(1.) They want answers, and(2.) they want entertainment.But the answers they seek aren’t usually about your product or service. The answers they seek are solutions to their problems.You must speak directly to the felt need.If you would win the attention of the people, give them the answers they seek.If you would win the attention of the giants, learn to speak their language.Do you understand Natural Language Processing, that algorithmic logic in the binary minds of Google and YouTube and all the other giants in the land? Learn to speak this language and the internet will become your trumpet.We’re always ready to be distracted by something delightful.Entertain us and we’ll give you our attention. Make us feel good and we’ll consider you our friend. Stand for something we believe in and we’ll give you our support. Make a difference and we’ll tell our friends about you. Give us happy thoughts to think and we’ll allow you to guide our minds.Win the heart and the mind will follow. The mind can easily find logic to justify what the heart has already decided.Entertainment is the only currency with which you can purchase the time and attention of a too-busy public. This is the essence of customer bonding.If you talk about yourself and why your solution is better than your competitors’, the only people who notice will be your competitors. But if you deliver a thrill of pleasure, the public will gather at your feet.Two young men sat through all the classes at Wizard Academy and learned how to use the life-changing tools of answers and entertainment.And with those tools firmly in hand, they wandered into the untamed wilderness of the internet exactly two years ago. They had no money to spend. None. But they had knowledge and time and energy.They chose to use their tools on YouTube. They could just as easily have chosen one of the other social media platforms, or they could simply have created a blog.The power is not in the platform. The power is in the answers and in the entertainment.They decided not to allow advertisers to attach ads to their daily YouTube show. This means they would receive no revenue from advertising, but it also means no false metrics created by click farms.Two years later, their worldwide audience is spending an average of 457,000 minutes a day watching their show. That’s more “viewing minutes” per day than are contained in 317 twenty-four-hour days. In a couple more months they’ll be receiving more than one year’s viewing time each day.Needless to say, they have become extremely influential in their chosen field and money is raining down on them like confetti in a ticker-tape parade.And they’ve not yet spent a penny on advertising.Roy H. Williams

When someone says, “Figures don’t lie,” know this: Figures lie, and liars figure.Never trust a weasel with a calculator.Do you remember the mortgage meltdown of 2008 and The Big Short, the movie that was made about it? There is a scene in that movie where investors Mark Baum and Vinnie Daniel go to visit Georgia Hale, an employee of the ratings agency Standard and Poor’s:Georgia Hale: So, alrighty, FrontPoint Partners, how can Standard and Poor’s help you?Vinnie Daniel: Well, we don’t understand why the ratings agencies haven’t downgraded subprime bonds since the underlying loans are clearly deteriorating.Georgia Hale: Well, the delinquency rates do have people worried but they’re actually within our models.Vinnie Daniel: Says you.Mark Baum: So you’re convinced the underlying mortgages in these bonds are solid loans?Georgia Hale: That is our opinion, yes.Vinnie Daniel: Did you check the tape? Have you looked at the loan level data?Georgia Hale: What do you think we do here all day?Vinnie Daniel: They’re giving these loans to anybody with a credit score and a pulse.Georgia Hale: Excuse me, sir. What do you think we do here all day?Vinnie Daniel: We’re not sure. That’s why we’re here.Mark Baum: Here’s what I don’t understand,Georgia Hale: We check, we recheck, we check again…Mark Baum: If these mortgage bonds are so stable, if they are so solid,Georgia Hale: Perhaps you should check your friend.Mark Baum: have you ever refused to rateGeorgia Hale: We stand behind them.Vinnie Daniel: That’s delusional.Georgia Hale: We stand behind them.Mark Baum: Georgia, have you ever refused to rate any of these bonds – upper tranche – as Triple-A? Can we see the paperwork on those deals?Georgia Hale: Oh, I’m under no obligation to share that information with you, whoever you might be.Mark Baum: Just answer the question, Georgia. Can you name one time in the past year where you checked the tape and you didn’t give the banks the Triple-A percentage they wanted?Georgia Hale: If we don’t give them the ratings, they’ll go to Moody’s, right down the block. If we don’t work with them, they’ll go to our competitors. It’s not our fault. It’s simply the way the world works.Vinnie Daniel: (after a dumbfounded pause) Holy shit.Georgia Hale: Yes, now you see. And I never said that.It seems to me the principal difference between the unregulated world of subprime loans and the unregulated world of online marketing is that there is no way to “short” the world of online ad fraud. There is no way to make a profit by exposing and ending it.In a widely-circulated news column published the day after Christmas, 2018, reporter Max Reid asked and answered an important question:“How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake…”“In late November, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of $36 million in two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered…”“Take something as seemingly simple as how we measure web traffic. Metrics should be the most real thing on the internet: They are countable, trackable, and verifiable, and their existence undergirds the advertising business that drives our biggest social and search platforms. Yet not even Facebook, the world’s greatest data–gathering organization, seems able to produce genuine figures. In October, small advertisers filed suit against the social-media giant, accusing it of covering up, for a year, its significant overstatements of the time users spent watching videos on the platform (by 60 to 80 percent, Facebook says; by 150 to 900 percent, the plaintiffs say).“In response to that story, Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao tweeted,“It’s all true: Everything is fake. Also mobile user counts are fake. No one has figured out how to count logged-out mobile users, as I learned at reddit. Every time someone switches cell towers, it looks like another user and inflates company user metrics.”Also in response to that story, Aram Zucker-Scharff tweeted,“The numbers are all fking fake, the metrics are bullshit, the agencies responsible for enforcing good practices are known bullshitters enforcing and profiting off all the fake numbers and none of the models make sense at scale of actual human users.”Zucker-Scharff is director of Ad Tech at the Washington Post.But none of this is surprising, or even new.Two years ago, at the annual convention of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, (a business organization that develops industry standards, conducts research, and provides legal support for the online advertising industry,) Marc Pritchard, CEO of Procter and Gamble, the largest advertiser on earth, said,“We’re all wasting way too much time and money on a media supply chain with poor standards at option, too many players grading their own homework, too many hidden touches and too many holes to allow criminals to rip us off.”“We have a media supply chain that is murky at best and fraudulent at worst. We need to clean it up and invest the time and money that we save into better advertising to drive growth…”“Adopt one viewability standard. Implement accredited third-party measurement verification. Get transparent agency contracts and prevent ad fraud. Yet, for many reasons we haven’t taken enough action to make a difference.”“Now maybe one reason is that cleaning up the media supply chain is not really a very sexy topic. I mean let’s face it, it would be a lot more fun if I were up here talking to you about the latest VR experience than bot fraud. But maybe there’s another reason and I’m going to make a confession, which may sound familiar to some of you. I confess that P&G believed the myth that we could be the first mover on all of the latest shiny objects despite the lack of standards and measurements and verification.”“We accepted multiple viewability metrics. Publishers self-reporting with no verification, outdated agency contracts and fraud threats with a somewhat delusional thought that ‘digital is different’ and that we were getting ahead of the digital curve.”“We’ve come to our senses. We realized there is no sustainable advantage in a complicated, non-transparent, inefficient and fraudulent media supply chain.”Marc Pritchard looked the Interactive Advertising Bureau in the face, much like Mark Baum looked the ratings agency, Standard and Poor’s, in the face during The Big Short. I bring these things to your attention only to suggest that you be extremely careful when evaluating marketing opportunities.I’ve heard the stories of exciting success being created through online marketing. And I’ve investigated a number of those stories to see what they have in common. The denominator I found to be most common was that the big winners have remarkably high profit margins, with 18x and 20x markups being typical.This is because it takes a 20x markup to fund a cost-of-marketing that exceeds 30% of sales.Am I suggesting that you avoid online marketing? No, I am not. I am merely suggesting that an enthusiastic “true believer” in online marketing may not be the best person to entrust with your ad budget.I don’t get involved in the selection of online media. Instead, I have partnered with knowledgeable, experienced online marketers who know how to separate fluffy data from hard facts, and whose basic nature is to be quietly, politely suspicious of everything they are told.I can put you in touch with them if you like.As for me, I’m continuing to invest heavily in broadcast radio ads and broadcast television ads. And based on the growth of businesses I witnessed last year, anyone who says that radio ads and TV ads don’t work anymore has been woefully misinformed.Roy H. Williams

The average person is afraid of criticism.But the person who has no fear of criticism is more likely to succeed. This lack of fear is what keeps them from being average.The average business owner is afraid their ads will be criticized.Do you want to kill a great ad? Show it to the people you trust.In the words of my partner Mick Torbay,“You need to understand something: the committee is not evil. The committee doesn’t want you to fail. The committee has nothing but good intentions. But the committee can’t innovate. More than anything, the committee wants to look good to the rest of the committee. The committee is afraid of looking stupid… The committee can only spot problems, downsides, possible pitfalls… So don’t be surprised that when you present a really, really great idea to a committee, the only thing you’re gonna get is a reason why that idea won’t work, one reason for every member of the committee. The committee will always pull you to the center. The committee will help you avoid risk, but risk and reward are two sides of the same coin. If you avoid risk, then huge success is now out of the question. Are you okay with that?”Most ads aren’t written to persuade; they’re written not to offend.But even a weak ad will cause your name to be the first that springs into the public mind if you give it enough repetition. This assumes, of course, that your competitors have equally bland ads.And frankly, that’s a pretty safe bet.But repetition costs money.Do you want to differentiate yourself with memorable, attention-getting ads that will accelerate your repetition by unleashing the persuasive powers of wit, humor, identity, and audacity?The first step is to find your corporate mission statement, take it outside into the sunlight, lift it high up into the sky, then lay it down on the sidewalk and set it on fire. When it is finished burning, sweep the powdery ashes into the grass. Paper ash is an excellent source of lime and potassium. This will raise the pH and help neutralize the acid in your soil.You have now put your mission statement to the best possible use.Just out of curiosity, why did you think you needed to write down all those generic things you believe in? Those things you included – the things you stand for – rarely differentiate you since most of us include, believe in, and stand for the same things: Individuality, Informality, Opportunity, Competition, Efficiency, Progress, and Helping Others. It is what you exclude, or stand against, that defines you. To gain attention and win a following, you must stand against the omission of one of these seven things:Individuality: individual initiative, individual expression, independence and privacyInformality: equality, directness, and an open societyOpportunity: ability to change yourself, your business, your country, and your worldCompetition: opportunity to win recognition, status, and material rewardsEfficiency: reduce wasted time, effort, and resourcesProgress: social, economic, and physical mobilityHelping Others: because we’re all in this togetherYou may have used different words, but those are the ideas contained in every mission statement, the ultimate expression of committee-think.You don’t become famous by championing everything.You become famous by championing one thing.The client who grew the most in 2018 stands against inefficiency. His company eliminates stress and frustration by responding instantly when customers call and then doing the job perfectly, making sure the customer’s time and money are never wasted. His local company grew by tens of millions of dollars last year. Most people love his ads but he still gets plenty of criticism.A client whose volume jumped almost as high stands against formality. His frank, unvarnished style of communication makes customers trust his people and his company. His ads are beloved by most of the population but he still gets savaged in social media.Does the client who stands against inefficiency also have ads that are frank, informal, and unvarnished? Of course he does, but it is his stand against wasting the customer’s time that sets his company apart.Does the client who stands against formality also respond quickly and do the job right? Yes, but it is his stand against distance in the relationship between himself and the customer that makes his company special.What is the principal enemy your organization fights against?When I say “principal enemy,” I’m not talking about your competitors. I’m talking about that thing you try so very hard to eliminate for your customer.What is it?Roy H. Williams

Ad writers hear it every day, whistling toward them like a bullet: “We need more traffic, that’s what we need; more sales opportunities!”I spent the early part of my radio career stepping up to the plate and knocking that fastball out of the park. If your back was against the wall, I was the man to call.I was like Coca-Cola, baby, I was everywhere.It was the early 1980s.My employer required me to wear a tie, so I hung one around my neck like a scarf. And to underscore my scruffy renegade look, I refused to tie my shoes. Everywhere I went, people would tell me, “Your shoes are untied,” and I would reply with a smile, “Yeah, I know.”I looked like a young drug dealer, and in a way, I was.I sold instant gratification advertising. “You want a crowd? Crowds cost money. How big a crowd do you want?”It’s actually pretty easy to attract a worked-up crowd. Do you want to know how to do it?These are the ingredients you must have at handTo Make Big Things Happen Fast:1. Urgency – There has to be a shortage of time or a shortage of quantity. The rule to remember is this: “No shortage, no urgency.” The best shortage is to have a limited number of a highly desirable item at a remarkable price. This is the time-tested formula that causes people to camp out on the sidewalk in front of Wal-Mart before the doors open the day after Thanksgiving.If the number of 82-inch TVs available for $999 is too few, people will say, “I don’t have a chance,” and stay home. But if the number is too many, no one will get excited because “there’s enough to go around.” So you definitely need to name a number. “While supplies last,” is a line that only a beginner would write. The customer hears that and thinks, “They only had one of those and they sold it before this radio ad ever hit the airwaves.” Result: no response.2. Credible Desperation – If you scream, “400 Toyotas MUST be sold this weekend! No reasonable offer refused!” you’ve got no credibility. The listener thinks, “WHY do you have to sell 400? What happens if you don’t? And what you consider to be ‘a reasonable offer’ is probably a lot more money than what I consider to be a reasonable offer, so I’m going to pass. I’ve got better things to do this weekend than haggle with a jackass car dealer.”Desperation loses credibility as time passes. That’s why these ads work less and less well the longer you use them.“Lost our lease, everything must go,” is another line that only a beginner would write. Specifics are more believable than generalities.Do you want to make your desperation credible? Do you want stuff to fly out the door? Say, “We’ve been thrown out! Our landlord rented our space to someone else and a dump truck will be here at 8AM on Monday, January 7th to haul away everything we leave behind….”3. Specifics – “…so we’re liquidating the entire inventory, every item in every department. We’re selling the showcases, the light fixtures and the cash registers. And if you can figure out how to get the wallpaper off the wall, we’ll sell you that, too. Call your friend with a pickup truck because you’re going to leave here with an ecstatic truckload of once-in-a-lifetime bargains. An $800 kayak is $179. Perfume that sells for $200 a bottle is yours for just $20. Diamond pendants worth a thousand dollars are just $129. A dozen doughnuts, made fresh while you wait, are just ONE DOLLAR and you can eat them while you’re shopping. So cancel what you had planned and get here as quick as you can.”4. Repetition – Nothing says “urgent news” like an ad that runs twice an hour for 72 hours. If a radio station will let you air only one ad an hour, then make sure it’s a 60-second ad. If a station has a policy that allows you to air only 3 ads every 4 hours, then buy a different station. Whatever you do, don’t air your supposedly “BIG” announcement with too little repetition. Did you read the part where I tried to make it clear that one spot per hour, 24 hours a day, was a MINIMUM schedule? I meant that.Month after month I sold urgent, high-impact schedules to business owners who licked their lips as they shook my hand.It wasn’t long before I was visiting twitching, crowd-addicted business owners who looked at me with hard, glittering eyes and a facial tic as they said, “Just like last time, but even better, okay? Even better. That’s what I want. Do whatever you have to do, just bring the people in.”High-frequency radio schedules and high-impact ad copy are the opioids of advertising. They’ll take away your pain, but when you come down from your high, you’re just a dark-eyed addict in an empty room. So you call the guy with the untied shoes again. But each schedule works a little less well than the one before until, finally, you have destroyed the health of your business.Do I still write high-impact ads and air them round-the-clock? Of course I do. Opioids exist for a reason. When the pain of an unforeseen business catastrophe is overwhelming and you have no option but to blow the trumpet and bang the drum, you do what you have to do and then deal with the ravages of addiction when it’s over.But it’s a long and painful recovery. And the thing you want more than life itself is to blow that trumpet and bang that drum one more time.So now you know How to Make Big Things Happen Fast.You just have to decide whether or not you want to.Roy H. Williams

Few people remember it because it was too long ago.April, 1962– America tries to overthrow Fidel Castro of Cuba in the “Bay of Pigs” invasion.July, 1962– Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev reaches a secret agreement with Fidel Castro to place Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba to deter any future invasion attempt.October 14, 1962– An American U–2 spy plane takes photos of Soviet nuclear missiles being assembled in Cuba, just 90 miles off the coast of Florida.October 22, 1962– American President John F. Kennedy appears on national television announcing a military quarantine of Cuba, warning the American people of the potential global consequences. “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”October 24, 1962– Nikita Khrushchev says the U.S. blockade is an “act of aggression” and Soviet ships bound for Cuba are ordered to proceed.U.S. forces are placed at DEFCON 2, meaning war involving the Strategic Air Command is imminent.October 26, 1962 – John F. Kennedy learns that work on the missile bases is proceeding without interruption and that an American U-2 spy plane has been shot down over Cuba, and its pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson, is dead.The world totters on the brink of nuclear war between superpowers.Americans everywhere stop in their tracks and look to the skies.And then two of them wrote a song:Said the night wind to the little lamb,“Do you see what I see,Way up in the sky, little lamb?Do you see what I see?A star, a star, dancing in the nightWith a tail as big as a kite.With a tail as big as a kite.”This was the image of a nuclear missile followed by its fiery tail in the night. But it was also the image of a star poised above Bethlehem, shining its light on a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes.Said the little lamb to the shepherd boy,“Do you hear what I hearRinging through the sky, shepherd boy?Do you hear what I hear?A song, a song, high above the treesWith a voice as big as the sea.With a voice as big as the sea.”Said the shepherd boy to the mighty king,“Do you know what I knowIn your palace warm, mighty king?Do you know what I know?A Child, a Child shivers in the cold,Let us bring Him silver and gold.Let us bring Him silver and gold.”Said the king to the people everywhere,“Listen to what I say,Pray for peace, people everywhere!Listen to what I say,The Child, the Child, sleeping in the night,He will bring us goodness and light.He will bring us goodness and light.”During the darkest hours of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a French veteran of WWII living in New York, Noël Regney, wrote the lyrics and his Brooklyn wife, Gloria, wrote the music.And for as long as they lived, neither of them could sing it all the way through without crying.Merry Christmas,Roy and Pennie Williams

Throughout my career as an ad writer, I’ve noticed that the easiest companies to skyrocket are those with a healthy and happy corporate culture.You know it’s a great company when everyone wants to get a job there and no one wants to leave.Let’s talk about culture.Definition One:In biology, a culture is a cultivation (usually bacteria, germs, or tissue cells) in an environment of nutrients.Culture: a cultivation in an environment of nutrients.Do you want to create a culture?Step One: EnvironmentStep Two: NutrientsDefinition Two:When we describe a person as “cultured,” we’re saying they are conversant in the arts.In the words of Phil Johnson, “You acquire an education by study, hard work and persistence. But you absorb culture by viewing great art, listening to great music and reading great books.”The arts are nutrients for the heart. To become “cultured” in the arts is to know how to make peoplefeel differently.Definition Three:When our friend Susan Ryan came home after 7 years of doing business in a third-world country, she said, “It’s hard to develop a strategy that will overcome hundreds of years of enculturation. Culture eats strategy for lunch.”A strategy is made of goals, objectives, and activities.A culture is made of values, practices, and behaviors.Princess Pennie says strategy is today’s “do list”and culture is all the yesterdays that made you who you are.Definition Four:The culture of a business is expressed as esprit de corp: the spirit of the group.Culture: a cultivation in an environment of nutrients.Business Culture: a cultivation of practices and behaviors in an environment of values.If you don’t have strong values, you won’t have a strong culture.If you don’t reward and celebrate employee practices and behaviors, you’re just mouthing platitudes and clichés. (Commonly known as mission statements and corporate policies.)Anyone can copy your strategy, but no one can copy your culture.Branding is nothing more than corporate culture made known.Good advertising promises your customer a specific experience.It is then up to your people to deliver that experience.Shout it from the housetops.Roy H. Williams

I’m reading Hemingway’s novel, Death in the Afternoon, and I like it.It is a detailed explanation of bullfighting.Not a story about a bullfighter.Bullfighting.I have no interest in bullfighting. None.The book has no character arc because it has no characters. It has narrative, but no narrative arc. No plot, no moments of crisis, no heroism, no romance.It is essentially an instruction manual.Why do I find myself drawn to this book?Yesterday morning I said to Pennie, “Hemingway is teaching me some things I can’t quite put into words, but as soon as I can figure out how to explain them, I’ll tell you what they are.”She was moving laundry from the washer to the dryer. “Read me a page that you liked.”“Page one hundred and twenty. Hemingway has been explaining how the bulls of Salamanca differ from the bulls of Andalucia when – out of nowhere – he inserts a literary device I’ve never seen in a book.”“What kind of literary device?”“He imagines a reader’s reaction to his book, then, speaking as that reader, he criticizes the author for not doing the thing that made him famous. Then, as the author, he accommodates this imaginary reader by inserting an imaginary conversation with an imaginary woman. It’s the same kind of multi-layered self-talk Robin Williams used to do.”“Read it to me.”But, you say, there is very little conversation in this book. Why isn’t there more dialogue? What we want in a book by this citizen is people talking; that is all he knows how to do and now he doesn’t do it. The fellow is no philosopher, no savant, an incompetent zoologist, he drinks too much and cannot punctuate readily and now he has stopped writing dialogue. Someone ought to put a stop to him. He is bull crazy.Citizen, perhaps you are right. Let us have a little dialogue.What do you ask, Madame? Is there anything you would like to know about the bulls?Yes, sir.What would you like to know? I’ll tell you absolutely anything.It is a difficult thing to ask, sir.Do not let that trouble you; talk to me frankly; as you would to your doctor, or to another woman. Do not be afraid to ask what you would really like to know.Sir, I would like to know about their love life.Madame, you have come to just the man.Pennie smiled and nodded her head. Then she handed me a gang of shirts on hangers and told me to put them in my closet.I hung the shirts on the doorknob of the laundry room and said, “It’s like that time I took Chris with me to Seattle.”“That time he began speaking to an imaginary television audience in that seafood restaurant?”“Yeah. He just put down his fork, stared at a point on the wall across the room and said, ‘Hello there, friends. It’s time, once again, for Workin’ It, with Chris Maddock.’ After a 5-minute opening monologue, he turned and began talking to a guest on his show; an invisible woman seated next to him. Never cracked a smile. Never broke character.”“How did the show end?”“He just picked up his fork and started eating again.”“What year was that?”“1999”“When did Hemingway write the bullfight book?”“1932”As she picked up a stack of folded towels, she said, “When we’re surprised by weird, unexpected twists and turns, it makes the journey more interesting.”I nodded my agreement and lifted the shirts off the doorknob.“Maybe you should do that in a Monday Morning Memo.”“Maybe I will.”Roy H. Williams

1967 – A little boy leaned on his elbows in front of a black-and-white TV in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, unaware that Walt Disney was dead.How could he be dead? I was watching him on TV.Looking right into my eyes, Walt told me about his purchase of 43 square miles of Central Florida, an area twice the size of the island of Manhattan, and his plan to build there an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT.)He was standing in a Hollywood film studio in front of a floor-to-ceiling map of his Florida project when he said,“Welcome to a little bit of Florida here in California. This is where the early planning is taking place for our so-called Disney World Project. Now, the purpose of this film is to bring you up to date about some of the plans for Disney World.”A little later, he said,“The sketches and plans you will see today are simply a starting point, our first overall thinking about Disney World. Everything in this room may change time and time again as we move ahead, but the basic philosophy of what we’re planning for Disney World is going to remain very much as it is right now…”That was the part I never forgot: Walt Disney knew his plan would evolve into something different than he imagined.Eighteen years ago Princess Pennie decided to buy some land and build a non-profit school for entrepreneurs, storytellers, and educators. We knew it would have a classroom tower with a library mezzanine and on-campus housing so that students wouldn’t have to sleep in hotel rooms.Everything else was an afterthought.Chapel Dulcinea was chosen by 1,111 brides in 2017, making it the most popular wedding chapel on earth. A free wedding chapel wasn’t part of the original plan, but if you’ve ever walked the campus at Wizard Academy, it’s hard to imagine it not being there.A certification course for the training of whiskey sommeliers (storytellers) wasn’t part of the original plan, either. Nor was The Crowded Barrel whiskey distillery.* And we could never have dreamed that Wizard Academy’s YouTube channel, The Whiskey Vault, would become the #1 whiskey-review channel on earth.We couldn’t have imagined it because streaming, online video did not exist in the year 2000.And now the Rocinante gym.A couple of years ago, Brian Clapp donated state-of-the art gym equipment but it never got used because it was housed in a part of the campus where students never go. The solution? Build a sleek, cantilevered gym covered in glittering silver metal with an 18-foot glass wall looking at Chapel Dulcinea, and put it next to the sidewalk between Spence Manor and Engelbrecht House.And of course we’ll be starting The House of the Lost Boys – your third student mansion – as soon as the gym is complete, probably in about 60 days.But that’s not the big news. No, not by a long shot.In late spring, 2019, the American Small Business Institute will be launching an important new certification course, The Ad Writer’s Masters Class, a one-year online course – 26 modules, followed by 26 essay assignments – followed by a three-day, face-to-face working examination by a board of Master Ad Writers.This is a really big deal.And very expensive. (12k, minus alumni discount)When you finally pass your board exams – and you can try as often as you want – you will be certified and admitted into The Ad Writers Guild, with appropriate pomp and fanfare and physical glitteralia.Because after all, the American Small Business Institute is an extension of that wonderful dreamscape called Wizard Academy.Indy says you should visit him in the rabbit hole. You know how to get in, right?Roy H. WilliamsPS – If you want to be notified when the Ad Writer’s Masters Class is about to be officially announced, email Daniel@WizardAcademy.org* The Crowded Barrel whiskey distillery isn’t technically located on Wizard Academy property. It was built with private funding on property owned by the academy’s very friendly next-door-neighbors, Roy and Pennie Williams.

Two brothers were locked out of their home, so they climbed onto the roof and entered the house through the chimney. When they crawled out of the fireplace, one of them had soot on his face, the other did not. The clean-faced brother immediately went into the bathroom and washed his face. The brother with soot on his face did not. Why?We are confused by the actions of the brothers until we put ourselves in their shoes and see the world through their eyes.The clean-faced brother looked at the sooty-faced brother and assumed they were both in the same condition, so he went and washed his face. Likewise, the sooty-faced brother did not know he needed to wash, because he was looking at the brother whose face was clean.We assume that we are like other people, and that they are like us.This is the assumption that misinformed the brothers.This is the assumption that misinforms the salesperson.Do you put yourself into the shoes of each customer and see the world through their eyes, or do you assume that they are like you?Do you unconsciously assume that your customer has your financial limitations? Do you secretly believe that they should do what you would do?These are the reasons you struggle as a salesperson.You believe you are being empathetic, but you are not.You aren’t putting yourself into their shoes; you’re putting them into yours.Roy H. Williams