Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

1. Bring positive and negative into close proximity.2. Resist the temptation to clad them in insulation.3. Witness the flow of electricity as it leaps between the two.Speaking in 1980 of his songwriting experience with Paul McCartney, John Lennon said, “He provided a lightness, an optimism, while I would always go for the sadness, the discords, the bluesy notes.”– David Sheff, All We Are Saying“The work John initiated tended to be sour and weary, whereas Paul’s tended to be bright and naive. The magic came from interaction. Consider the home demo for “Help!” – an emotionally raw, aggressively confessional song John wrote while in the throes of the sort of depression that he said made him want ‘to jump out the window, you know.’ The original had a slow, plain piano tune, and feels like the moan of the blues. When Paul heard it, he suggested a counter-melody, a lighthearted harmony to be sung behind the principal lyric – and this fundamentally changed it’s nature.”– Joshua Wolf Shenk, The Atlantic, July-August 2014, ‘The Power of Two,’ p. 80We’re talking about the magic of duality.We’re describing the foundations of transformative thought.“When he began to write songs, Paul [McCartney] wasn’t thinking about rock and roll. He wanted to write for Sinatra.”– Joshua Wolf Shenk, The Atlantic, July-August 2014, ‘The Power of Two,’ p. 80Lennon’s McCartney was Sinatra’s Riddle.I bought Why Sinatra Matters mostly because I was curious why a bestselling novelist would write a biography. Sure, Sinatra was a great singer, but since when does a great singer really matter? And why Sinatra instead of some other singer, actor, writer or photographer?What I found was that Hamill’s book isn’t so much about a person, but about a time.“Frank Sinatra was the voice of the 20th-century American city.”– Pete Hamill, Why Sinatra Matters, p.94In the beginning, Sinatra was merely a teen idol, the heartthrob of teenage girls. Twice he tried to enlist as a soldier in WWII, but was rejected each time because of a punctured eardrum. As the other young men went off to boot camp or basic training there were a lot of lonely women left in the land. Sinatra was every girl’s boyfriend singing of his loneliness.“…in the music he professed a corrosive emptiness, an almost grieving personal unhappiness. The risk attached to his kind of singing was that it promised authenticity of emotion instead of its blithe dismissal… His singing demanded to be felt, not admired. It always revealed more than it concealed.”– Pete Hamill, Why Sinatra Matters, p.130When the soldiers came home from WWII, Sinatra’s career fell flat.“One thing is certain: for many of those who came back from WWII, the music of Frank Sinatra was no consolation for their losses. Some had lost friends. Some had lost wives and lovers. All had lost portions of their youth. More important to the Sinatra career… the girls started marrying the men who came home. Bobby socks vanished from many closets. The girls who wore them had no need anymore for imaginary lovers; they had husbands. Nothing is more embarrassing to grownups than the passions of adolescence, and for many, Frank Sinatra was the passion.”– Pete Hamill, Why Sinatra Matters, p. 133-134Sinatra became Sinatra when his Riddle arrived.“Sinatra started out with far more female than male fans. He ended up with more male fans. This happens to very few pop singers.”– Pete Hamill, Why Sinatra Matters, p.127Sinatra’s Riddle had a name: Nelson. What Paul McCartney was to John Lennon, Nelson Riddle was to Frank Sinatra.The first product of the Nelson Riddle/Frank Sinatra partnership leaped out of the radio with a beaming smile on April 30, 1953. “I’ve Got The World On A String” became a runaway hit.“Lightness shines as the primary ingredient of the Riddle style… Riddle always manages to make everything sound light; that way, the weightiest ballad doesn’t become overly sentimental and insincere.”– Will Friedwald“I love how Riddle used Ravel’s approach to personality,” said Quincy Jones, who has written arrangements for everyone from Count Basie and Ray Charles to Michael Jackson. “Nelson was smart because he put the electricity up above Frank. He put it way upstairs and gave Frank the room downstairs for his voice to shine, rather than building big, lush parts that were in the same register as his voice.”Paul, if you’re reading this, I’d like to suggest that when you were young, you weren’t really admiring the dark vocal voice of Frank Sinatra as much as you were admiring the light musical voice of Nelson Riddle.Riddle “put the electricity up above Frank”just like you put the sparkle above John.If I’m right about you being affected by the arrangementsof Nelson Riddle, please let me know.And please knowthat we miss Johnalmost as much as you do.Roy H. Williams

Institutions of higher education offer a degree path, a specific series of classes that will prepare you for the journey you’re about to take. Wizard Academy’s board of directors is preparing a similar map for those happy adventurers who come here for refreshment, instruction and advice.Dr. Oz Jaxxon and space shuttle scientist Mark Fox prepared an initial list of core curricula to present to the rest of the board of directors at last Tuesday’s board meeting. It triggered an interesting conversation.I looked at the list and said, “I like it. Some of these classes are informative – giving students a new set of skills that will take them to the next level. Others are transformative – opening their eyes to new perceptions – giving them a new set of stars to shine brightly among the shadows of the mind, allowing them to navigate with greater confidence.”Dennis Collins said, “Navigate?”Knowing that Dennis had spent 40 years in advertising, Princess Pennie answered, “In advertising, navigation is strategy; finding the message that will have the greatest impact.” Dr. Nick Grant added, “The informative classes help you externalize your strategy.”I was so jarred by the next statement that I can’t remember whether it came from Corrine Taylor, Dr. Lori Barr, or chairman of the board Jean Backus. All I can remember is that a woman’s voice said, “But isn’t that communication?”“Yes!” I thought, “Public Speaking 101, Advanced Wordsmithing, Writing for Radio and the Internet and the other informative classes help students implement what they learned in transformative classes like Magical Worlds, Escape the Box and Da Vinci and the 40 Answers.”Speaking and writing, singing and acting and all the other arts flash into existence when you externalize an internal realization.Transformative classes load you up with internal realizations.Informative classes equip you to externalize those realizations.And externalized realizations are called “communication.”Dr. Grant spoke up again. “Transformative classes give you a new operating system. Informative classes give you cool applications that run on that operating system.”Small realizations make incremental differences: Evolution.Big realizations make exponential differences: Revolution.Which do you need right now?Have you decided?Good. We have a class for that.Roy H. WilliamsA

Cedric Yau is one of a handful of geniuses I know.In our most recent conversation, Cedric opened my eyes to a truth I had not previously encountered, but it reinforced everything I know about ad campaigns and it’s about to make Cedric a billion dollars.I’m not exaggerating.You’ve seen long lines of ants carrying food back to their hives, right? So where is the centralized intelligence that brings such sophisticated synchronization to their actions? If you dig even a little bit, the mystery of ant behavior moves very quickly from interesting to miraculous to intoxicatingly impossible.Consider: You and I are more than 1,800 times as tall as the ants that live in our yards. The mowed grass through which they walk would be for us a jungle 600 feet high. A single ant colony forages for food each day across an area that would be 1,156 square miles for you and me.Here’s the zinger: If you and I and all our friends are scattered across 1,156 square miles and one of us finds some food, how does that one notify the rest of us who are scattered across 1,156 square miles? Ants have no telepathy, telephones or radios and there are no bosses to give them instructions.But they do have 3 unifying principles that synchronize the entire colony.Does your business have unifying principles?Viewed in high speed at the macro level, ant behavior seems to be guided by chaos theory as their movements create a pattern too vast for the unaided mind to comprehend. But when mapped on a computer, what at first appeared to be randomness becomes a beautiful fractal image built upon the unifying principles of self-similarity.Fractal images are maps of highly organized chaotic systems and their patterns seem to mirror the behavior of the stock exchange and population fluctuations and chemical reactions. Using chaotic math, computers today are producing images that look exactly like the beauty found in nature… ferns and clouds and snowflakes and bacteria. These maps can also resemble mountains and the human brain and the frost that forms on a windowpane.Ant behavior goes from intoxicatingly impossible to seductively predictable when the principles that bring an ant colony into unity are reverse-engineered. Here are the ingredients of ant-magic:1. If you find food, take some home and leave a scented trail.2. If you find a trail, follow it and add to the scent. If that trail leads you back to the hive, turn around and follow it the other direction.3. If you don’t know where food is and you don’t where a trail is, wander.That’s what the miracle of the ant-line looks like when you reduce it down to its unifying principles.But Cedric wasn’t studying ants so that he could better understand advertising or team motivation. Cedric has an altogether different use for these insights. My closing words to Brother Yau were these: “Based on what you’ve told me, it should take about 2 years for you to quietly put one billion dollars into your bank account.”“That’s right.”“My suggestion is to then publish exactly what you did and how you did it. Spend a few months being interviewed on talk shows and then come and teach a class at Wizard Academy.”“That’s exactly what I had in mind.”We’ll keep you posted.Roy H. Williams

Have you ever gone shopping only to come home with something entirely different than what you had planned to buy?Of course you have. We all have.“Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say,‘these are the conditions, now what happens next?'”– Richard Feynman, (winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize)Advertising people can be like that, too. We like to believe that we can ask, “What does the customer want?” and an answer will be forthcoming. But in truth, what the customer wants is in a constant state of flux.Decision is a destination, a tangible place of certainty, but the multiple paths that will take us there can be faint and foggy and damp. We are confronted by choices unanticipated. We find new information, unexpected options, possibilities we did not foresee.Simply stated, our buying motives can evolve from a tiger to a mouse to a llama to a rhino to a little pink pony in the space of a single hour.Darwin would be made dizzy.Professor Sexton reminded me of all this recently when he discovered that our ongoing “evolution of motive” has a scientific name. And like all scientific names, this one is both confusing and dull: Heterogeny of Ends.Read the WIKIPEDIA entry for Heterogeny of Ends and you’ll learn that“an ongoing behavioral sequence must often be understood in terms of ever-shifting patterns of primary and secondary goals. For example, one may accept the invitation of a friend to attend an art show. Initially, the motive is simply the anticipation of a pleasant evening in good friendship, but in the course of that evening, one encounters a highly desirable work of art and wishes to purchase it. A whole new set of motives now enter the picture and exist alongside – and in addition to – the original motive.”I present this information for your consideration today because I’m concerned about the public’s growing reverence for numbers and measurements and statistics. We seem to have arrived at the silly conclusion that every decision-making process is the same.We human males are small and simple enough to think we can ask, “What does a woman want?” in the belief that someone, somewhere, someday will finally be able to answer us.But a woman will answer that question with one of her own; “Who is the woman and what time is it?”What does the customer want?Your customers want confidence that they’ve made the right decision. The big umbrella answer is confidence. But I cannot tell you what combination of information and events will give a particular customer confidence.I cannot list the little raindrop answers. And when the sad day arrives that someone finally can, human beings will no longer be magical.Roy H. Williams

When Jacqueline Bouvier married JFK she became “Mrs. Kennedy.”She was the Princess Di of her generation.Following her husband’s assassination, Jacqueline’s voice was almost never again heard in public. She quickly became the most mysterious and glamorous woman on earth. When she married Aristotle Onassis, the world’s richest man, she became forever thereafter, “Jackie ‘O’.”“Like so much in her life, the aim of her signature style was concealment. A chemical straightener disguised the naturally kinky hair she hated. The teased bouffant masked a low hairline. Kid gloves covered large, strong, mannish hands… the cut of her suit jacket artfully concealed the breadth of her shoulders and her muscular back and arms. The skirt disguised hips she thought much too broad. The shoes were specially cut to make large feet look smaller and more feminine. Sunglasses hid brown eyes set so far apart that her optician had to special-order a suitably wide bridge. Dark lenses had the additional advantage of guarding emotions that since childhood she had taken tremendous pains to hide.”– Barbara Leaming, Mrs. Kennedy, (2011)But, oh, she was glamorous.A“One way or the another, all glamour follows the formula laid out by Hollywood photographer George Hurrell, ‘Bring out the best, conceal the worst, and leave something to the imagination.’ Mystery is an essential element of glamour as it provides a blank space for the imagination, a spot where the audience can project its own desires.”– Virginia Postrel, The Power of Glamour Silence, too, provides a blank space and a mystery. It is a type of glamour. Few people use it to full advantage.“Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”– Leonardo da VinciNassim Nicholas Taleb, too, understands this power of silence. “Never say no twice if you mean it.”Taleb also observes, “What we call a ‘good listener’ is usually someone with skillfully polished indifference.” And when that same cold indifference turns its face toward you, the silence can hurt like frostbite. “You remember emails you sent that were not answered better than emails that you did not answer.”Roger Lincoln says,“There are two rules for success.(1) Never tell everything you know.Ha! Silence – the voice of Mystery – strikes again.Perhaps we should study it.I think maybe I’ll startnow.Roy H. Williams

Dean Rotbart says you are three different people.The first of the three is the person you see when you look in the mirror;  the person you believe yourself to be.The second is the person other people see when they look at you;  the person they believe you to be.The third is the real you.“Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them.” – Allan GurganusGurganus is right. The truth happens to everyone, but stories only happen to people who can tell them.Professor Sexton recently told me about a new definition of reality known as the antenarrative: Ante: prior to, Narrative: the story.It reminds me of that third person spoken of by Rotbart.The antenarrative is the story that no one can tell. Not even the people who were there. It is chaotic, without logic and disconnected. It is the way things actually happen. Narrative, on the other hand, is crafted in retrospect as a storyteller assembles selected puzzle pieces in 20/20 hindsight; the beginning, middle and end of the tale are now a foregone conclusion. If the storyteller chooses skillfully and arranges the antenarrative pieces artfully, his story will sparkle with fairy dust. If the storyteller chooses predictably and organizes the pieces chronologically, the story will smell like cat food.Antenarrative happens to everyone. But stories only happen to people who can tell them. Ernest Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for making the narrative of his finely-crafted fiction feel as unvarnished and rough-hewn as antenarrative. In speaking of The Old Man and the Sea, he said,“In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardnesses are easy to see, and they called it style.” – Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir, p. 198Another Pulitzer-winning book, Founding Brothers, is an attempt to look at selected moments of American history through that same spider-web lens. The American antenarrative of 1776 is that those colonists loyal to Britain reviled the conspirators who bound themselves together in a Declaration of Independence. Those conspirators were plagued by doubts, short of cash and argued continually as the success of their rebellion was in constant jeopardy. They never thought of themselves as “The Founding Fathers,” nor did they consider the survival of the American nation to be inevitable.But you and I live under the curse of post facto knowledge,“But of course the American Revolution had to succeed because, well, it just had to.”We never consider how this landmass called 21st century America might easily have remained an extension of England.Post facto knowledge is always troublesome, but especially so in ad writing.Facts are not necessarily believable just because they are true.Facts are not necessarily interesting just because they are true.Facts are not necessarily relevant just because they are true.This is why ad writers never let the truth stand in the way of a good story.Harley Davidson – American by Birth. Rebel by Choice.Volkswagen – Think Small.Walmart – Save Money. Live Better.Adidas – Impossible is Nothing.Levis – Quality never goes out of style.IBM – Solutions for a smart planet.Research the antenarrative of any of these brands and you’ll see exactly what I mean.Now let’s get back to Rotbart’s assertion. Is there a chance that1. what you see when you look at your company  is different than2. what other people see when they look at your company?  And could it be that3. your happiest future might result from a story not yet told?Come to Wizard Academy and we’ll help you find that story.Your future changes every time you come here.Let it out.Let it breathe.Let it live.Roy H. Williams

The next time someone tells you an advertising success story, especially if that success was online, ask to see the ad – the content – that triggered it.Here’s a Really Big Tip for you. You might want to write this down:“The media doesn’t make the ad work. The ad makes the media work.”I’m spending a lot of time these days fielding questions about online marketing. The most fervent of these petitioners are the ones who talk about the amazing response they’ve seen on FaceBook.“Does everything you post trigger a big response?”“No, but when it does work, Wow! It’s awesome.”“Show me something you posted that triggered a lot of interest.”Guess what I’ve learned from these encounters? FaceBook friends pass along only those things they find to be remarkable. And it’s always the message – the content – that is remarked upon. Jeff Greenspan of Buzzfeed says it clearly: “Nobody wants to be a shill for your brand, but they are happy to share information and content that helps them promote their own identity.”Do you sometimes visit a website and then see banner ads for that same company everywhere you go for the next several days? Congratulations, you’ve been “retargeted.”Retargeting is the shiny new object in advertising. (Google’s version of it is called Remarketing but it’s essentially the same thing.) Retargeting reminds me of a boy who stalks a girl after a bad first date, saying, “Give me another chance. Give me another chance. Give me another chance. Give me another chance…”A better solution, in my opinion, is to not blow the first date.Spend your time creating a remarkable offer. When your message is right, whatever media you choose to deliver that message is going to perform like nothing you’ve ever seen.BOOM. Success story.You can sell tickets to watch the fireworks.Bruce Feiler in the New York Times reported a few days ago that a recent study of two billion web visits found that 55 percent of readers spent fewer than 15 seconds on a page.Evidently, David Ogilvy’s decades-old observation remains correct:“Five times as many people read the headline as read the first line of body copy. So when you’ve written your headline, you’ve spent 83 percent of your ad budget.”Scan.Scan.Scan.Scan.Scan. Note. Move on.Scan.Scan.Scan. Note. Probe. Disconnect. Move on.Scan.Scan. Note. Probe. Double-check. Bingo. One-click. Here in 2 days.Ten websites attracted this shopper but only one of them made the sale.Q: What did the others do wrong?A: They focused too much on technology to reach the shopper and too little on what to say after they met.Advertising Doesn’t Fail. Ads Fail.Small business owners are drowning in sales pitches telling them they can “reach the perfect target” digitally. I don’t dispute that claim in the slightest. But each of the nine websites that didn’t make the sale “reached the perfect target,” didn’t they? What did it get them?That New York Times story about 2 billion page visits goes on to say,“In the last few years, there has been a revolution so profound that it’s sometimes hard to miss its significance. We are awash in numbers. Data is everywhere. Old-fashioned things like words are in retreat; numbers are on the rise. Unquantifiable arenas like history, literature, religion and the arts are receding from public life, replaced by technology, statistics, science and math. Even the most elemental form of communication, the story, is being pushed aside by the list.”Let me say this plainly: Wizard Academy will forever remain a guardian of the “unquantifiable arenas,” like history, literature, religion and the arts. We will keep up with technology, but we’ll never look to it for wisdom, emotion, persuasion or humanity.Marketing Miracles are far more often the result of finding a better story than of finding a better technology. Marshall McLuhan was wrong. The media is just the media. The message is the message.Roy H. Williams

Do you have code words and phrases whose meanings are known only to the people closest to you?I laughed a little when I realized the absurdity of some of the communication abbreviations that Pennie and I have developed over the years.Every couple has code phrases, I suppose, and there is doubtless a story behind every one. Are you willing to send us some of your code phrases and their definitions? I think it could be fun to compile a dictionary of them.Here are some of the phrases Pennie and I use most often:“Get official”To change from your work clothes into something ugly but comfortable, signifying that you are now officially home and in for the evening.“Foie gras” \?fwä-?grä\“I would spit this into a napkin if these other people weren’t with us. For the love of god don’t eat any of it.”“Go for the poise.”“Pull through this parking space into the one opposite, thereby leaving the car poised to be driven out forward when we leave.”“One more thing”“Objection. This is not what we originally agreed. You’re changing the deal we made.”“Preliminary weed-eat”An abandoned task you have no intention of completing.“Fox”Obviously artificial. (A mispronunciation of faux, recalling a moment 25 years ago when we overheard a condescending snob say that a piece of furniture had a “fox finish.” We’ve been chuckling about it ever since.)“Paper cigar”A brilliant improvisation crafted quickly to avoid disaster.“Rye grass”A widespread belief that isn’t true.“Don’t make me say Loren L. Lewis”“Of course I can get all this in one load. I am a magna cum laude graduate of the Loren L. Lewis School of Hauling.”Will you send us your code phrases and their definitions? Indiana Beagle will likely publish them in the rabbit hole and if we get enough, Wizard Academy Press will publish a little dictionary and we’ll have an extensive, secret language of our own.Are you in on this deal? Send your phrases with their definitions to Daniel@WizardAcademy.orgAroo.(I learned that one from Indy. It means “gotta run”)Roy H. Williams

You can do it.I don’t know how long it will take or what you will have to go through, but you can most definitely do it.1. See your objective clearly in your mind. You must see it before you can seize it. It takes courage to focus on your objective.Reach for the courage that dangles in front of you. Don’t fear that it will prove to be a carrot on a stick and you the unwitting mule.Courage is necessary to the seizing of your objective.Reach for your courage. It waits for you.Grasp your courage. See your objective. Identify your adventure.2. Name your objective. Saying it out loud moves it from private to public, from thought to action, from fantasy to reality.When you’ve said it aloud in front of people you care about, you are no longer a spectator. You are a player.3. Know that you will fail and rejoice when you do.Education is theoretical. Experience is practical. Battle scars are the marks of a warrior. Happiest are those moments when you rise from the ashes of bitter defeat to try again, smarter, wiser, unstoppable. Everyone is watching you. Smile at them. Show your teeth.A con man lies to someone who trusts him and walks away with money. A criminal threatens violence and walks away with money. These quick and hollow victories leave both men sadly unsatisfied. Lottery winners are famously miserable. Rich kids are depressingly bored.Yes, rejoice when you fail because nothing is more tragic than winning quickly.4. Cherish the caterpillar. Trust in the butterfly you cannot see. An angel is dressed as a beggar. Wisdom wears the hat of a fool. Power hides behind the eyelids of a quiet old woman.Every miracle wears a disguise.5. Expect evolution. Your objective will be altered by the passage of time. An infant bears little resemblance to the woman she will become, but she is the same girl, surely.Fantasy is frozen and changeless in the mind but a worthy objective is durable and alive. Your objective will grow and mature as you do. Don’t be surprised when it changes, because you are changing, too.You can do this.I don’t know how long it will take or what you will have to go through, but you can most definitely do this.Lift your eyes and see the courage that floats in the air before you.Reach for it.Hold tight.Roy H. Williams

Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women.I borrowed that sentence from Charles Johnson, a storyteller who begins his tale, Middle Passage, with that line. I chose not to enclose it in quotation marks because I didn’t want to alert you to the fact that misdirection was about to slap your cheek.Quotation marks do that, you know. They are animated bookends that wave like semiphore flags, shouting, “These words are special.”Misdirection is half the storyteller’s art.“Justice?— You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.”1The other half is resolution: We are surprised to learn that women are a disaster. But after a moment’s reflection, we are not. We are surprised to learn the law is not just. But after a moment’s reflection, we are not.“Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.”2We are surprised to learn that a woman can turn into the wrong person. But after a moment’s reflection, we are not.Every magician depends on misdirection and resolution.The comedian is a magician of laughter. The greater his misdirection, the greater the orgasm of laughter at the punch line, that moment of resolution when it all comes together.The storyteller is a magician whose stage is the page. Words are the top hat from which he extracts his rabbits and the endless handkerchief he pulls from his sleeve. They are the handsaw he uses to cut the pretty girl in half and the wheels he uses to roll those halves together again.A great communicator says things plainly and brings clarity to the mind. This is difficult. But it is not magic.A storyteller turns the heart this way and that, showing it things it has never seen, things that have not yet happened, things that never will, using misdirection and resolution over and over, touching you in places you didn’t even know were there.Every business, every person, has a story to tell. You know this, of course.But now you face a difficult choice: Will you speak clearly and win the mind? Or will you speak magically and win the heart?Roy H. Williams