Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

I made the decision 20 years ago that the Monday Morning Memo would rarely be about news or current events. I chose to leave the singing of fleeting facts to a chorus of professional reporters. It is a choir that does not need my voice.But today I’m making an exception.There are four things I’m betting you’ve noticed. Perhaps they’ve raised an eyebrow. I want you to know that you’re not alone.Social Media has become the new blackmail.*Customers are using threats of negative online reviews to extort cash and free products from sincere and honest businesspeople. My office is being bombarded with stories and questions from clients in every business category. I believe we’ll ultimately see an expansion of our libel laws to help curtail this racketeering, but that sort of change requires several years of debate. In the meantime, we’ll likely see the emergence of a new web device that allows businesspeople to respond with their side of the story.No, you’re not the only one being blackmailed by sociopaths.Businesses are struggling to find good employees.Employee recruitment ads are a significant percentage of what my partners and I are writing these days. The upside of this trend is that it’s an indicator of a surging economy. Businesses everywhere need more employees and few people need a job.No, you’re not the only one looking hard for good people to hire.The Witch Hunt has begun.**In the second half of the upswing to the zenith of a “Me” generation (most recently 1973 to 1983,) we elevate heroes and create idols to worship, (Michael Jackson and Ronald Reagan, among others.) But in the second half of the upswing to the zenith of a “We” generation (currently 2013 to 2023,) we subject our heroes to microscopic scrutiny and destroy every idol we can find. The zenith of a “We” is that time when the most innocent observation is likely to be misinterpreted as sexism, ageism, racism or religiosity. I am reminded of the tongue-in-cheek advice of Elbert Hubbard 120 years ago, “To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.” It was his way of saying, “Don’t let the fear of criticism rob you of the courage of your convictions.”Amen.(Uh-oh, was that sexism? Should I have said Amen and Awomen? What? You say it was religiosity? Can I just back up and start over?)Where did 2014 go?In late October I began receiving emails from a lot of people who don’t know each other, yet each of them chose the same 4 words: “Where did 2014 go?” These emails have continued for about 3 weeks and this does not happen every year. 2014 seems to have somehow vanished before our eyes. Wasn’t it just last month that we were trying to figure out how to navigate Obamacare?Nope. That was a year ago.The problem with living in the future is that it never arrives and suddenly your life is over.No, you’re not the only one looking for a quiet moment, a good friend and a desert island.Roy H. Williams

Phil was nearly 70 when I met him 30 years ago. He’ll be 100 soon. Phil doesn’t know it, but I think of him as one of the people who speaks wisdom into my life.Do you have a favorite word? Phil’s favorite word is balance.Most of us are out of balance and suffering for it.We think we’re in danger from bad things but those bad things rarely materialize. Our problem is that we’re pulled out of balance by our strong attraction to good things.You are resourceful. You get things done. You are a person of accomplishment. You will never be destroyed by those who stand in your way and try to push you back.The danger is from those who stand behind you and push you forward. “Go! Go! Go! You’re almost there! Just a little bit more! You can make it! Hooray! You da’Man! Keep it up! No pain, no gain! You can do this! Woo-hoo!”It’s our nature to take good things too far.A strong work ethic is a good thing. Every unbalanced workaholic has one.Compassion is a good thing. Every burned-out minister knows this.Recognition is a good thing. Just ask any celebrity who has forgotten who they are.We read in the Bible that Jesus would often leave the crowds he was teaching and disappear into the wilderness. My suspicion is that he hung out with Lazarus – the brother of Mary and Martha – during these times because Lazarus cared about Jesus the man more than he cared about Jesus the worker of miracles. I think maybe Lazarus was a “safe” person for Jesus, meaning that he made no demands on Jesus, and that’s why Jesus wept when Lazarus was gone and why he called him back from the grave.At least that’s how it happens in the screenplay I’m writing.Everyone needs a wilderness into which they can disappear. They need safe people to be around, friends who make no demands on them.Although we officially call Wizard Academy “a school for the imaginative, the courageous and the ambitious,” our students have laughingly called it “a summer camp for grown-ups” ever since we launched this place 14 years ago. Lately I’ve been thinking they might be right. In fact, we’re so often compared to Peter Pan’s island of Neverland that our next student mansion will officially be called, “The House of the Lost Boys.”Seriously, I’m not making that up.I like to believe that Wizard Academy is the desert island where Jesus would have hung out with Lazarus when he needed to get away from the pressing crowds. And I like to believe this is where you will come when you need to do the same.And one last thing: according to Robert Louis Stevenson, this is the island where the treasure is buried.Come, let’s see if we can find it.Roy H. Williams

I’m talking with a man about his happy future. There will be decisions to make and risks to take, but it’s a future that can definitely be his.And then he says, “I don’t want to get my hopes up.”The air leaves my body and I want to cry. And then I want to slap him, wake him up, shout the question that screams its own answer: “Do you know what happens when you don’t get your hopes up? Nothing! Not a bloody thing!”Lethargy. Apathy. Ennui. Depression. Hopelessness. This is the black water that rushes to fill the emptiness when you refuse to get your hopes up. So for the love of God I’m begging you, “Get your hopes up.”He says he doesn’t want to get his hopes up because he doesn’t want to be disappointed.Sigh.Perhaps the right answer is for him to buy a bigger TV, watch more sports and drink more beer. Yes, that’s the ticket. The clock will tick, the time will pass, and when they wheel his ancient body into a nursing facility, he’ll watch those same sports on a different TV and drink Ensure instead of beer.“Congratulations, friend. You never had to resort to Plan B. You never had to figure out what went wrong or find a way to fix it. You never had to deal with the joys and pains of Life, the only sport worthy of a human being.”Can you believe in things not immediately present? Of course you can. Tomorrow isn’t here, but you believe it will come.Can you have confidence in things you cannot see? Yes, you prove this every time you write a check. You have confidence – faith – that the bank won’t let you down.Is there anyone outside yourself that you care about enough to sacrifice time, energy and money to help them? If so, you have experienced love.I know of a sad woman who got her hopes up once, and things worked out pretty well for her. She became extremely famous and was widely quoted and lots of books have been written about her. She said,Many people have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.”Do you have a worthy purpose?That woman couldn’t see the future and she didn’t hear the voice of God saying, “Everything is going to be okay.” In fact, she couldn’t see or hear anything at all. Her name was Helen Keller and she lived with disadvantages so severe that the mind recoils from imagining them.When everything else is gone, faith, hope and love remain.Some people have faith in themselves. Others have faith in something or someone else. Where you put your faith is up to you. Likewise, each of us chooses what or whom to love. But once those choices have been made, faith gives us courage, love gives us energy, and hope is the light that shines in the darkness.Make a difference. Have an adventure. Get your hopes up.Turn on the light.Roy H. Williams

The silent workings of my mind are of little interest to anyone but me, yet occasionally I feel the need to chronicle some small discovery; to write it down so that it might continue to exist after I have been forgotten.Once a year I write a Monday Morning Memothat is more for methan it is for youand this is that one.If you quit reading now, I’ll understand.In Cervantes’ book of 1605, Don Quixote never meets Dulcinea. She exists only in his mind. Psychologist Carl Jung would call her Quixote’s “anima,” the imaginary woman that represents the innermost heart of a man.But in Man of La Mancha, the 1966 Broadway play by Dale Wasserman, Dulcinea is an actual woman, a reluctant prostitute in whom Don Quixote sees only purity, beauty and grace. That play won 5 Tony Awards and ran for 2,328 performances. In 1972, it was made into a major motion picture starring Peter O’Toole as Don Quixote and Sophia Loren as Dulcinea.Dale Wasserman got the credit, but the character relationships and narrative arc of Man of La Mancha belong entirely to John Steinbeck.Follow my trail of breadcrumbs and I will tell you what I know.1952: The prologue to East of Eden tells us that Steinbeck was familiar with Cervantes and Don Quixote. In it, he speaks to his editor and close friend, Pat Covici:Miguel Cervantes invented the modern novel and with his Don Quixote set a mark high and bright. In his prologue, he said best what writers feel—the gladness and the terror.“Idling reader,” Cervantes wrote, “you may believe me when I tell you that I should have liked this book, which is the child of my brain, to be the fairest, the sprightliest and the cleverest that could be imagined, but I have not been able to contravene the law of nature which would have it that like begets like—”And so it is with me, Pat……Cervantes ends his prologue with a lovely line. I want to use it, Pat, and then I will be done. He says to the reader: “May God give you health—and may He be not unmindful of me, as well.”John Steinbeck1953: Ernie Martin, the Broadway producer of Guys and Dolls, asks Steinbeck to write a sequel to Cannery Row so that it might be made into a play.I have in my possession the Christmas gift John Steinbeck sent Ernie Martin later that year, just as Steinbeck was beginning to write Sweet Thursday. It’s a copy of the 1949 edition of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha. Inscribed on the front endpaper of that book is a note written and signed by John Steinbeck.Dear Ernie -:This is required preparation for Project X.John Steinbeck,Xmas 19531954: John Steinbeck publishes Sweet Thursday, a love story between “Doc” of Cannery Row and Suzy, a reluctant prostitute from the Bear Flag Hotel. Steinbeck’s note to Ernie Martin makes it clear that Suzy is Dulcinea.1955: Sweet Thursday becomes a Broadway play called Pipe Dream with a musical score by Rodgers and Hammerstein. The play receives the largest advance ticket sales in Broadway history to that point, $1.2 million, and is nominated for 9 Tony Awards.I think it would be safe to say that Dale Wasserman, a lifelong playwright, would have been very much aware of Pipe Dream in 1955.1957: John Steinbeck writes 114 pages of Don Kehan—The Marshall of Manchon, but he abandons the novel on December 27 of that year. The unfinished book is a delightful retelling of the story of Don Quixote as a gentleman farmer in southern California in 1957. Dulcinea, once again, is presented as a reluctant prostitute. But now she’s called “Sugar Mae.”This is the second time in 4 years that Steinbeck has envisioned a prostitute Dulcinea.1959: I, Don Quixote, a non-musical teleplay by Dale Wasserman, airs only once, as the DuPont Show of the Month on CBS Television. In 1965, when Steinbeck’s health was in decline, that teleplay is adapted to become Man of La Mancha, a legendary hit on Broadway. All the applause went to Wasserman, but that story was clearly Steinbeck’s.Why did Steinbeck see Dulcinea as a prostitute when Cervantes clearly did not?The answer, I believe, lies in the “anima,” that imaginary woman who represents the innermost heart of a man.1959: In a private letter to his agent, Elizabeth Otis, Steinbeck writes,I’m going to do what people call rest for a while. I don’t quite know what that means – probably reorganize. I don’t know what work is entailed, writing work, I mean, but I do know I have to slough off nearly fifteen years and go back and start again at the split path where I went wrong because it was easier. True things gradually disappeared and shiny easy things took their place. I brought the writing outside, like a cook flipping hot cakes in a window. And it should never have come outside.”– John Steinbeck, to Elizabeth Otis  Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, p. 657Steinbeck saw the imaginary woman in his mind as a reluctant prostitute because he saw himself as a reluctant prostitute.As a professional ad writer, I know the name of every demon with which he wrestled.John Steinbeck recovered his sunshine and gave us Travels With Charley before he died. It is, in my opinion, the greatest travelogue ever written. Not surprisingly, Steinbeck referred to his 75-day trip across America as “Operation Windmill” and named his GMC pickup-with-camper “Rocinante,” after Don Quixote’s horse.On the campus of Wizard Academy – a school for the imaginative, the courageous and the ambitious, of which I am Chancellor – a larger-than-life bronze statue of Don Quixote gazes upward at Wedding Chapel Dulcinea where it hangs off the edge of a cliff far above him. Eight hundred and twenty-four couples were married at the chapel last year, at no cost whatsoever.So it would appear that I, too, have found a patch of sunshine to call my own. And I hope you have, as well.Nothing defeats demons like sunshine.Roy H. Williams

The problem with most websites is that they’re built inside out.It’s an easy trap to fall into, almost inevitable, in fact.You’re on the inside of your company, looking out at your customer.She’s on the outside, looking in.Your website is built from your perspective, not hers. But let’s be fair: your website tells her everything she needs to know to make an informed decision, right? And who knows better than you? After all, you’re the expert.See how easy it is to build an “inside out” website?The effectiveness of Search Engine Optimization in 2014 depends on how well you anticipate and answer your customer’s questions; not the questions you feel she ought to be asking, but the ones she’s actually got in mind.Not only does SEO improve when your website is built “outside in,” but your Conversion Rate – the metric that measures the percentage of shoppers who become buyers – also takes a happy jump upward.The payoffs of an “outside in” website are big.And it’s much easier to accomplish than you think.Buyer Legends is everything you need to know, packed into 20 short pages.A handful of companies were given advance copies. Here’s a sample of what they’re saying:“Before reading this book I had already created some very successful online companies over the last 18 years. Most online business owners find that growth and forward progress become harder to achieve when you have become expert in every aspect of your company. Once you’ve reached that level, the definition of a ‘successful year’ typically means that you’ve maintained the profitability of the year before, or it could mean that you had an increase of 5%.Well, let me tell you that after only a few hours of going over the contents of this book, I was able to increase my sales volume by over 46%. This massive increase in sales and profits took only 3 weeks to implement. As a skeptic myself, I hesitated to provide the actual amount of my business increase for fear that it would look suspicious.As I stated, an increase of only 5% would have made my year a fantastic success, but the results I achieved from the information in this book are breathtaking.”By the way, I can vouch for the truth of that testimonial because it was written by someone who met Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg at Wizard Academy 5 months ago and got an advance copy of Buyer Legends at that time. So when he says “already successful,” you need to understand that he was already doing a few million dollars per year in net profits. Now, after implementing Buyer Legends, “Up 46%.”My favorite testimonial, though, is from someone I’ve not yet met:“Having worked first hand with the Eisenbergs on mapping our customers’ critical paths and creating scenario narratives, I can confidently say the Buyer Legends process works. My team’s focus at Google is on acquiring SMB advertising clients. And if you’ve ever worked with these types of businesses, you know there is huge diversity through the spectrum of small and medium businesses. We’d miss opportunities and gaps by over-aggregating (i.e. taking too high level a view) though often the challenge was in effectively communicating our insights. The Buyer Legends framework allowed us to more effectively focus our efforts, improving the bottom line. And equally important, to make a more compelling case for change with our marketing, engineering and product colleagues.”Paul Jeszenszky,Head of Global B2B Digital Marketing Center of Excellence, GoogleThis 20-page downloadable eBook is only three bucks at Amazon.com and it will open on any device.Seriously, do you need me to say more?Roy H. Williams

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

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

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

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

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