Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

The door to immediate action is easily kicked open by the steel-toed boot of urgency.If you want people to take immediate action, you’re going to need a credible shortage.A shortage of product. “Only 11 remain!”A shortage of time. “Sale ends Saturday at 6PM!”A shortage of capacity. “Only 128 seats are available!”Some kind of shortage.But smart marketers don’t create a series of non-stop urgencies.Smart marketers create a bond with future customers.And you don’t create a bond by crying wolf.You create a bond by telling a story.Do you want to inspire your customer?Inspirational stories are never about accumulation.They’re about sacrifice.What have you sacrificed and why? Are you willing to tell that story?Scientific American published an essay on May 8, 2013, in which Jag Bhalla quotes Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind, “The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor. Everyone loves a good story; every culture bathes its children in stories.” The purpose of these stories is to engage and educate the emotions. Stories teach us character types, plots, and the social-rule dilemmas prevalent in our culture.Stories explain how the world works and help us understand who we are.“Research consistently shows that fiction does mold us. The more deeply we are cast under a story’s spell, the more potent its influence. In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. Studies show that when we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard…”“We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories. But why are humans storytelling animals at all? Why are we, as a species, so hopelessly addicted to narratives about the fake struggles of pretend people? Anthropologists have long argued that stories have group-level benefits. Traditional tales, from hero epics to sacred myths, perform the essential work of defining group identity and reinforcing cultural values.”– Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us HumanStories are what shape and define a tribe.Make no mistake, people who bond with a brand are people who have joined a tribe. And that’s a healthy thing. According to Professor Alison Gopnik, “other people are the most important part of our environment. In our ultra-social species, social acceptance matters as much as food.” *We include ourselves in dozens of tribes. Tribes of geography, school, sport, faith, music, nationality, art, hobby, history, family affiliation, hair color, age, gender, lifestyle, transportation, recreation, food, fashion, tattoos, facial hair and footwear. We buy what we buy to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are.Our purchases tell our story.Most ads are full of information. They don’t really tell a story.Story = character + predicament + attempted extrication.“Stories the world over are almost always about people with problems,” writes Jonathan Gottschall. They display “a deep pattern of heroes confronting trouble and struggling to overcome. Stories give us feelings we don’t have to pay full cost for.” Stories free us from the limits of our own direct experience and allow us to learn from the experiences of others.Online reviews are stories told by customers about their experiences.Testimonial ads are another type of story told by customers about their experiences. But we listen to these stories with a grain of suspicion as we seek to pierce the veiled motives of the storytellers.Propaganda is a story that represents itself to be the truth.We believe it only to the degree that we trust the storyteller.Entertainment is a story that doesn’t represent itself to be the truth.If a story doesn’t claim to be the truth, there is no reason to doubt it.This is why we are more willing to believe fiction than nonfiction.Entertainment is the currency that will purchase the time and attention of a too-busy public.Have you found your story?Are you telling it well?Are people entertained?How’s business?Roy H. Williams

1. Freeze-frame each moment when something rocks your world.2. When you cry or become frightened or get angry or laugh or are overwhelmed by a sense of wonder, reverse-engineer what just happened. Ask yourself, “Why am I feeling this way? How did they do this to me?” Was it something in the sequence of events? Was it in the shapes or colors, words or music, symbols or associations? Was it facial expressions, vocal intonations, or a combination of several of these at once?3. Experiment with what you learn. The techniques that worked on you will work for you, as well.Communication is usually auditory, graphic, or gestural.These are its primary elements:Auditory:1. Words, and the phonemes that compose them2. Music: pitch, key, contour, interval, tempo, rhythm, texture and harmony3. Sounds: jets landing, babies crying, dogs barking, crickets chirping, etc.Graphic:1. color, form, line, shape, space, texture, value, proximity and radiance2. image – what is being shown, and what associations does it trigger?3. metaphor – what does it mean?Gestural:1. facial expression2. symbolic gestures and movements3. dancingSimultaneous elements of communication can reinforce or contradict each other.Perception is deepened when elements reinforce one another and agree.Interest is elevated when an element contradicts and disagrees.An apple tree is ready for harvest, all its apples a husky shade of red except for one – just beyond your reach – that shimmers electric blue.You’ll wonder about that apple all day.Predictability is the silent assassin of surprise and delight.Defeat it by modifying expected patterns of communication.Enter new subjects from unusual angles of approach.Communicate details. Specifics are more credible than generalities. The more specifically you speak to a single person, the more powerfully you speak to everyone.We love to be in the presence of powerful communicators who take us places and make us feel things; actors and filmmakers, dancers and photographers, sculptors and illustrators, singers and architects, teachers and musicians, painters and writers.When brilliant communicators work their magic, we get lost in it.Would you like to become one?You already own the hardware.Have you ever used a zoom lens? Think of your brain as having one. As you zoom in, you exclude the context to focus on the tiniest details. But when you zoom out, you see those details fold in on themselves to reveal the ever-expanding context of “the big picture.” The idea that captivated your zoomed-in attention is now just a tiny cog in a complex machine.The key to keeping your reader/viewer/listener off-balance is to zoom in after zooming out, and zoom out after zooming in. Take them on a journey with you. Make them think they’re going to see one thing, then show them something different. Unexpected elements make stories and photographs and paintings and music and everything else more interesting.I agree with Leo Burnett: The great danger of advertising isn’t that we will mislead people, but that we will bore them to death.Please don’t.Take them someplace they never expected to go.Show them something they didn’t expect to witness.Give them an experience they didn’t see coming.Roy H. Williams

When you’re trying to transfer a thought or a feeling to someone else, the impact of your communication will be determined by the following equation:How big is the thought in your mind, or the feeling in your heart?How quickly can you transfer it?The Law of Impact (or force,) documented by Isaac Newton, applies to communication as much as it does to physics: impact is the product of mass (size and weight) times acceleration (speed.)How massive is your thought or feeling?How quickly can you transfer it?The works of illustrators like Norman Rockwell and painters like Andrew Wyeth are often criticized as being “too obvious.” But the visual communications these artists produced were among the 20th century’s most recognizable works of art.Rockwell and Wyeth became famous because they were able to communicate big ideas clearly and quickly. Today I’m going to help you do the same with words.Have you ever noticed how short quotes pack a greater punch than long ones?The fewer the words, the greater the impact.Shorter hits harder.Boring people take too long to say too little.Interesting people know what to leave out.The best way to get good at this is to fill your ears with it. As you read, so will you write. If you read the writings of long-winded people, you will learn to wrap a great many words around a small idea.But if every day you read big ideas condensed into few words, you will soon be able to speak and write with greater impact.“The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.” – Gene Fowler (1890 – 1960)Ray Bard published my Wizard of Ads trilogy 19 years ago. We made the New York Times bestsellers list together. The second book in that series became the Wall Street Journal’s #1 business book in America.More than 50 percent of the books published by Bard Press have become New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers. No other publisher has achieved even 10 percent.As a young man, Ray sold books from door to door and he’s been collecting quotes about selling for more than 40 years. His jury of more than 1,000 quote judges spent an entire year evaluating and voting on the best-of-the-best from Ray’s collection.Today, August 7, 2017, is the day these quotes are finally available. Maximum thought in minimum words.Fired-up! Selling.This small book is a gorgeous work of art.It looks like embossed leather but Ray swears no animals were harmed.Three silk placeholder ribbons.Full-color on every page.The distilled essence of a lifetime collection.Think of it as a textbookthat teaches youhow to saybig thingsquickly.Roy H. Williams

I always look forward to my lunches with Ray Bard because he teaches me valuable things. He doesn’t intend to teach me things; it just happens.Our short lunches last 3 hours. Our record is 6 ½.Ray is my publisher.During our most recent lunch, Ray said – and I’m inclined to agree with him – there are only three sources of wealth: Luck, Accident, and Desire.If you inherited the money, married the money, won the lottery, bought the right stock at the right time, or went to work for the right company and were given a pile of stock options, you were lucky. I don’t say that to make you feel small, but we shouldn’t pretend you can teach someone else how to do what you did. Picking the right stock or going to work for the right start-up seems like an easy thing to do in hindsight, but I’ve never seen it happen using foresight.If you’re an artist, a writer, or an inventor who got rich, you were probably never really in it for the money. You got rich by accident. You always knew money was a possibility, but you chose to do what you did because you love it. It scratches your itch. It makes you happy. It makes you feel alive. So again, if we’re being honest, your advice about how to get rich would probably sound like this, “Be good at what you do. Study, experiment, refine your craft. Follow your instincts. Trust your gut. Be true to yourself. Break the rules. Blah, blah, blah.” I can say this because what little I’ve acquired has come to me in exactly this way. And that advice you just read – including the blah, blah, blah – is exactly what I tell people when they ask me how to “get to the next level, financially.” I tell them this because they would be disappointed if I told them the truth, that I am a writer because I am embarrassingly self-indulgent and I love to write. It is something I let myself do.But nearly all my wealthy friends got rich intentionally. It was their lifelong desire. They could teach you how to get rich, too, but only if you have sufficient patience, discipline, and desire.Getting rich is like losing weight; rarely does it happen by accident.How to lose weight isn’t a secret; you’ve got to consume less calories than you burn. Millions of Americans want to lose weight and they’re convinced they have the patience and discipline to lose weight. But the only ones who lose it and keep it off are the ones for whom the desire to lose weight is so strong that the pain of staying as they are is greater than the pain of doing what they need to do.Likewise, how to get rich isn’t a secret; you’ve got to do things other people aren’t willing to do. You’ve got to swallow your pride, restrain your spending, make hard choices, say no to yourself, get back up when you’re knocked down, and learn from your mistakes rather than defend them. But most important of all, you’ve got to patiently, relentlessly, obsessively keep your eye on the prize.Are you beginning to understand what I said about patience, discipline and desire?I met a successful man who spent 3  hours telling me about the biggest failures of his career. At the end of those 3 hours, I knew his blind spot. His failures had a common root: this otherwise brilliant man believed that any intelligent person who has been taught the right thing to do, and who truly believes it’s the right thing to do, can be counted upon to do the thing they’ve been taught.His successes, on the other hand, did not count on people doing anything other than what they preferred to do.Knowing why to do it – and how – is not the same as doing it.To be unable is to lack the skill.To be unwilling is to lack the desire.Don’t they lead to the same place?Intelligent people like you can easily be taught. But let me see the depth of your desire – your willingness to do what you don’t want to do – and I’ll know the likelihood of your success.Roy H. Williams

You hear a lot of talk these days about how no one listens to the radio anymore.Interestingly, the people who make these claims offer no evidence beyond the fact that commercial free music can be obtained through online streaming. This reminds me of that famous malaprop by Yogi Berra, “No one goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”If you want to see raw numbers, look at the Nielsen Audio Ratings. But I submit to you, as a supplement to those happy numbers, a few observations fueled by my investment of tens of millions of dollars in advertising expenditures each year for more than 25 years.Radio advertising is more cost-effective today than it has ever been, mainly because rates have been suppressed by the myth that “no one listens anymore.”This is great for media buyers. Bad for station owners.Four of my friends own large, online companies, and each of them tells me the exact same thing. “To do real volume online, you’ve got to have a big enough markup to let you spend 30 to 35 percent of gross sales on marketing.” The first time I heard this, I couldn’t believe my ears. Most of the advertisers I’ve known spend 5 to 6 percent of gross sales on advertising. The really aggressive ones spend 10 to 12 percent. “You’ve got to be selling products with a 10 to 20x markup or you’re not going to make any money using pay-per-click,” one of them told me while the other three nodded in agreement. The smallest of their online companies does almost $40,000,000 a year. The largest did $85,000,000 last year and one-third of that was spent in online marketing.Fortunes are being made online. This isn’t a secret.But any brick-and-mortar business that abandons broadcast media – and I include television in that definition – and tries to replace broadcast with pay-per-click or social media or content marketing is going to lose a fortune online.I’ve seen it happen again and again.Ryan Deiss is the principal of digitalmarketer.com, a highly regarded educational site for persons who need to know how to make online advertising work. When Ryan spoke to a roomful of long-term radio advertisers recently, he showed them the 8 sequential things that online marketing can accomplish. The first of these 8 was awareness. “No one in this room should be spending a penny online for awareness,” he said. “The cost of creating awareness online is incredibly expensive compared to radio. You just need to maximize the online traffic that radio can easily drive to your website.”He spent the rest of that day telling those advertisers how to generate more online leads and increase their online closing ratios while cutting their online ad budgets by half.Ryan got a thunderous applause at the end of his session. People love the advice of honest, straightforward experts.One of the business owners in the room that day was Ken Goodrich, the owner of Goettl (rhymes with kettle) Air Conditioning in Phoenix, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Tucson. When Ryan’s session was over, Ken raised his hand to say, “My cost of lead generation for A/C system replacement was about $441 per lead, roughly the national average for my category, until I cut my online budget by half and moved all that money into 52-week radio. Two years later, the sales volume of my 78 year-old company had more than doubled, and my cost per online lead these days bounces around between $39 and $47.”Ken Goodrich went on to make it clear that his customers are still going online before they call him. Some of them are reading reviews and some are just looking for his phone number, but most are typing the name of their city and “air conditioning” into the Google search string. Goettl Air Conditioning pops up, of course, alongside all its competitors. But unlike the other companies listed in those search results, Goettl leaps off the screen. “Hey! I know those guys!” says the prospective customer. Goettl gets the click, the call, and the sale.Consistent radio advertising creates echoic retention, a powerful recall cue.But the credit that belongs to radio is often given to SEO consultants and other digital marketing weasels who pretend that broadcast is dead. Remember what Goodrich told us? His customers are still going online before they call and they’re still seeing his name pop up. But it was only after he became a household word through radio that a much higher percentage of them began clicking “Goettl.”My only goal today was to open your eyes a little wider to seven fundamental truths you’ve always known:Fifty percent of the population in your city spends enough time listening to broadcast radio each week to make them easily and cheaply reachable through that medium.   The best way to use radio is to become a household word before the customer needs what you sell, then wait for them to need you. This requires a 52-week schedule.   The customer is still going to go online before they call. (Ryan Deiss told us that 94% of all retail products and services were sold by brick-and-mortar stores in 2016, but that 97% of those purchases were made by customers who went online before they bought from those brick and mortar stores.) Your online presence definitely matters.The cost of generating awareness through radio is a tiny fraction of the cost of generating similar awareness online. In 2016, my cost of generating a 3-frequency each week (reaching the same listener with the same message 3 times,) 52 weeks a year, ranged between 14 cents and 72 cents per person/per year, depending on the city. Fifty-two week radio is the best way to achieve involuntary, automatic recall, and effectively own the hearts and minds of up to half the people in your community.The biggest mistake made by radio advertisers is that they too often try to create a sense of urgency. This works okay for products with a short purchase cycle, like food and entertainment, but it’s a lousy way to build a relationship with the customer.Businesses don’t fail because they were reaching the wrong customer. Businesses fail because they were saying the wrong thing.Nothing matters so much as your ad copy. When you’re saying the right thing, people remember it and repeat it. Your customer is surrounded by influencers. Quit trying to target the perfect customer. Just win the hearts of whoever happens to be listening.Roy H. Williams

Exactly three hundred and thirty years ago – roughly ten generations of parents and children ago – the French explorer La Salle, searching for the mouth of the Mississippi River, was murdered by his own men.We were experiencing dysfunction among supposed team members.In Virginia, a panicked Nicholas Spencer of Westmoreland County provides Virginia Governor Francis Howard with, “Intelligence of the Discovery of a Negro Plott for the Distroying and killing of his Majesty’s Subjects, with a designe of Carrying it through the whole Collony of Virginia…”White people feared that people of another other race might overcome them.Back home in England, King James II orders that his declaration of indulgence be read in English churches, a first step toward securing religious freedom in the British Isles. Then he disbands English parliament.The person in charge of the mightiest nation on earth decided he didn’t need any help.And the Royal Society is rocked by the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica.According to author Edward Dolnick,* the Royal Society of 1687 was:“a grab-bag collection of geniuses, misfits and eccentrics who lived precariously between two worlds, the medieval one they had grown up in and a new one they had only glimpsed. These were brilliant, ambitious, confused, conflicted men. They believed in angels and alchemy and the devil, and they believed that the universe followed precise, mathematical laws. In time they would fling open the gates to the modern world.”I am intrigued by Dolnick’s description of the Royal Society because I can think of no better description of the cognoscenti of Wizard Academy than, “a grab-bag collection of geniuses, misfits and eccentrics.”But then Dolnick rings the wrong bell. He contrasts a belief “in angels and alchemy and the devil,” with the belief that “the universe follows precise, mathematical laws,” as if those two beliefs are mutually exclusive.I don’t believe in alchemy but I do believe in angels.And I believe the universe follows precise, mathematical laws.And I believe in miracles.Let’s say that you and I are playing pool. Anyone with a knowledge of physics knows that a pool ball cleanly struck by the cue ball will continue to roll toward the hole where it’s headed: because the universe follows precise, mathematical laws. But what if, just as the ball is about to drop into the hole, an unnoticed bystander reaches down and lifts the ball off the table? Have the laws of physics been destroyed? Of course not.We simply failed to take into consideration the intervention of the unnoticed bystander; that unseen stranger who occasionally works a miracle.Roy H. Williams

Every successful person has a blind spot.Here’s what often happens:You have a unique approach, a particular process, or a special emphasis.It separates you from your competitors.Your commitment to it makes you successful.So far, so good. You found a way to be different and it made you a success!But now your hockey-stick growth has begun to flatten out and level off.You’ve obviously reached a plateau.How do you get to the next level?Most people double-down on the thing that brought them success.That’s when it happens: Blind Spot Blowback.The thing that made you a success will rarely take you to the next level.I’m not suggesting you abandon it. That would be stupid. You’ve got to maintain what you’ve begun.But that’s easy. You like doing it. It comes to you naturally. That’s why you feel good about pressing the accelerator even further.But your business did not quit accelerating because you failed to press the gas pedal hard enough.Your business quit accelerating because it’s time to shift into second gear.Your first innovation shot you like a rocket off the starting line. You were shoved back into your seat by the g-force of your acceleration. The crowd went wild.And then things began to level off.Second gear, idiot! Second gear!But few people ever find second gear.They believe in first gear. First gear works for them. First gear is where they feel comfortable. Second gear seems counter-intuitive. They’re not sure second gear would be the right thing for them.They want someone to help them get more speed out of first gear.Your business doesn’t have an automatic transmission.You’ve got to press the clutch and move the lever.Only then can you press the pedal again.And someday, if you’re lucky,you’ll get to do thisall over againat a muchhigherlevel.Are you lucky?Roy H. Williams

I’m in a strange mood. I hope you’ll forgive me.I’ve been contemplating things unsaid. Deeds undone. Symphonies unfinished.The reality of mortality has shown up as a hole in the light, a silhouette on the horizon. And its whispering voice has led me to compile a list of unfiltered thoughts that seem to me, remarkable. Thoughts that should not be lost.Perhaps I overreact. I get this way when I’ve been traveling too much, speaking too much, alone too little.I think of all the things I’ve learned that deserve to be remembered. These are the first five that pop into my misty mind as I sit on this airplane in the sky.Don’t follow your passion. Let your passion follow you.Passion does not produce commitment.Commitment produces passion.Passion does not lead to success.Commitment leads to success.Recreation is not a vocation.Rest, Shabbat, is necessary. So set aside your labor – often – and inhale the stuff of life. But recreation is not your goal; it is your fuel. The perpetual pursuit of pleasure leaves a person hollow inside. A life filled with money and no work is a fantasy for fools. Do you see the boredom that hides behind the smiles of the idle rich? Look beneath that boredom and you will see the walking dead.Everyone needs the same three things: Identity, Purpose, and Adventure.Identity: Who am I? Where is my tribe? Who are my people? Abraham Maslow said the greatest unmet need of 65% of us was our need to belong. I’ve never doubted it for a moment.Purpose: What should I do with the rest of my life? What should I stand for? What should I stand against? How can I make a difference, leave a mark, be remembered?Adventure: How will I overcome the obstacles that will stand in my way, the challenges that will confront me, the enemies that will make themselves known?When it’s time to make something from nothing, you must first decide:How to End: begin with the end in mind.Where to begin: approach from an unusual angle.What to leave out: shorter hits harder.And the most important thing to remember is this:Marry your best friend. Your mate will be your partner in every aspect of your life. Don’t marry beauty. Don’t marry wealth. Marry the person who will guard your back in the darkness when dragons are about and things get tricky wicked.Marry your best friend.Roy H. Williams

A world of absolutes is a tidy world, but narrow.The wider world must make room for things that are not.“Make room for things that are not.” I wrote about that last week, didn’t I?We cling to absolutes, I think, because they give us the illusion of stability in a world of constant change.We see rivers on maps, but in the strictest reality, you cannot step into the same river twice. The ripples, the creatures, the floating debris, even the shorelines change with each flickering moment.I wrote to you in October of 2015 about The Color that Doesn’t Exist.What we’re talking about today is like that, but different.The people you meet and the moments you experience in advertising and movies and literature and art exist only in the mind. They are symbols of possible pasts and futures.Symbols are the signposts of imagination.When we think ahead to the possible outcomes of our efforts, we see realities that could happen, but these are never the river we step into when we get there.We’re talking about companies and brands.We are attracted to brands that believe in the things we believe in, brands that show us a reflection of ourselves.Every successful brand has a personality. A strong brand is an entity that lives in the imagination, just as real and full of hope and promise as any character in a television show, novel, or movie.Much of what we buy is purchased to remind ourselves –and announce to the world around us –who we are.The idea of a brand is lot like the idea of home.Bart Giamatti was the Commissioner of Major League Baseball, a Professor of Comparative Literature, and the President of Yale University. These are his thoughts about “home.”“There is no great long poem about baseball. It may be that baseball is itself it’s own great long poem. This had occurred to me in the course of my wondering why home plate wasn’t called fourth base. And then it came to me: Why not? Meditate on the name, for a moment, ‘home.’ Home is an English word that is virtually impossible to translate into other tongues. No translation catches the associations, the mixture of memory and longing, the sense of security and autonomy and the accessibility and the aroma of inclusiveness, of freedom from wariness. They cling to the word ‘home’ and are absent from ‘house’ or even ‘my house.’ Home is a concept, not a place. It is a state of mind where self-definition starts. It is origins: the mix of time and place and smell and weather, wherein one first realizes one is an original. Perhaps like others, especially those one loves, but discreet, distinct, not to be copied. Home is where one first learned to be separate. And it remains in the mind as the place where reunion, if it were ever to occur, would happen… All literary romance, all romance epic, derives from the Odyssey and it’s about going home. It’s about rejoining – rejoining a beloved, rejoining a parent to child, rejoining a land to its rightful owner or rule. Romance is about putting things aright after some tragedy has put them asunder. It is about restoration of the right relations among things. And going home is where that restoration occurs because that’s where it matters most. Baseball is, of course, entirely about going home. It’s the only game you ever heard of where you want to get back to where you started; all the other games are territorial – you want to get his or her territory – not baseball. Baseball simply wants to get you from here back around to here.”We remember home, not so much as a place, but as a state of mind.Likewise, the power of a brand is a state of mind.The creation of a good product is easy.The delivery of a delightful service is difficult.The telling of a good story; that’s where the money is.Roy H. Williams

We live in a universe of paired opposites.Proton and electron. Inhale and exhale. Extend and contract. Rise and fall. Male and female. Day and night.What you embrace does not define you nearly so much as what you exclude.I’m speaking of self-definition.EXAMPLE: One person says they love cars made by Ford. Another person says they love Ford “because it is the oldest American brand; I refuse to drive anything foreign.” Which of these persons gives us more insight into who they are?Any description of what the purchase price includes “at no extra charge” is made more credible by describing what is not included.I’m speaking of products and services.EXAMPLE: One air conditioning company says their A/C Tune-up includes cleaning the coils. Their competitor adds, “…and we clean the coils the right way, not the easy way.” Which of these companies gives you more confidence?Any promise of benefit a customer will gain from your product or service is sharpened and accelerated by contrasting that benefit with what it is not.I’m speaking of advertising and marketing.EXAMPLE: The executive team of Jigsaw Health recently spent 3 days in private classes at Wizard Academy. When they explained to us that their magnesium supplement would make a person feel calm and relaxed while it simultaneously boosted their energy, I said, “That sounds like ad-speak. Your ads will be more believable when you describe what the product is not, and what its benefits are not.”These people understood.These people got to work.They wrote, “Our cravings for artificial stimulants and relaxants increase when we don’t get enough magnesium.” They wrote, “Magnesium is a mineral, not a vitamin. And it has been stripped out of the foods we eat.” And, “Magnesium delivers optimistic energy, not caffeine energy,” and, “It makes you feel yoga-relaxed, not alcohol-relaxed.”Have you ever noticed how every mission statement sounds like every other?This is because we all believe in the same things; fairness, honesty, integrity, and treating people right. And as our mission statements progress, we begin to double-dip into the same values we’ve already mentioned. “We desire only to make a fair and honest profit,” and, “We believe in treating our employees right,” blah, blah, blah. Predictable ad-speak.Differentiation is the goal of communication in business.But you won’t differentiate yourself by explaining what you believe in, or what you include. Differentiation is razor sharpened and rocket accelerated by explaining what you don’t believe in, and what you leave out.EXAMPLE: One company says, “We believe in gathering all the data.” Their competitor says, “We give you step-by-step solutions, NOT data without interpretation.” Which of those statements is more convincing?Most people hesitate to define themselves by what they reject, for fear of being perceived as negative.But is it negative to say, “the right way, not the easy way?” Is it negative to say, “a mineral, not a vitamin?” “Optimistic energy, not caffeine energy?” “Yoga-relaxed, not alcohol-relaxed?” And when you say, “step-by-step solutions, NOT data without interpretation,” you’re excluding an idea, not a person.Give some thought to what you are not. Tell people what you don’t believe in.It won’t change who you are, but it will definitely change how people see you.Roy H. Williams