Gratuitous sorcery and incantations from actual Wizards.

Showmanship is symbolism, the essence of pageantry and tradition: the sweep of an extended arm with an upraised palm in an expansive gesture; a deep bow with the added flourish of both arms extended to the sides, again with palms turned upward; dramatic emphasis expressed by hopping in place on the balls of your feet – timed precisely to the syllables you speak – pent-up energy that demands release.

Showmanship is mesmerizing but it takes courage because it’s easy to feel you’re making a fool of yourself.

Storytelling requires finesse and restraint as you work your way through a series of small reveals, waiting with the patience of a magician for the moment of the big reveal.

Showmanship and storytelling don’t change reality but they do change perception.

Are you beginning to understand why an ad man might be interested in these?

In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford’s business school determined that the intensity of the pleasure we experience when tasting wine is linked directly to its price. “And that’s true even when, unbeknownst to the test subjects, it’s exactly the same Cabernet Sauvignon with a dramatically different price tag.”

The story you tell about the wine affects how it tastes.

The study wasn’t speculative; it was medical. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) to monitor the medial orbitofrontal cortex – the pleasure center of the brain – of wine connoisseurs who tasted wines after hearing stories about them.

The scientific verdict: good stories accelerate the physical pleasures generated through our senses. This should come as no surprise, really. We’ve known for decades that humans are uniquely gifted to attach complex meanings to sounds.

Words. Work. Magic.

Daniel Whittington’s “Tour of Scotland” – an adventure in storytelling and showmanship and single malt Scotch – has attracted so much attention that Wizard Academy is launching the world’s first curriculum to officially certify Whisk(e)y Sommeliers. In this endeavor he’ll be joined by cognoscenti Tom Fischer, the founder of BourbonBlog.com, one of the world’s most authoritative voices on corn liquor (Bourbon.)

Whisk(e)y Marketing School isn’t about making whiskey; it’s about putting on a great show and telling great stories to accelerate the pleasure of customers “taking a Tour of Scotland” or “going on a Bourbon Run.” Fine restaurants worldwide will soon have tables full of people mesmerized as their Whisk(e)y Sommeliers wheel carts to their tables, open elegant wooden boxes, slip magnificent badges of office over their heads, and begin their tales of wonder.

Same song, second verse:

Angel Skating^TM is a new organization whose mission is to use storytelling and showmanship to popularize a little-known sport called artistic roller skating. You’ve seen figure skating in the Winter Olympics, right? Now imagine exactly that, but on roller skates. The objective of Angel Skating is to help artistic roller skating become the figure skating of the Summer Olympics.

Angel Skating was born last week when Craig Arthur, the director of Wizard of Ads, Australia, was in Austin for 10 days of catching up at the home office. Wizard of Ads partners Tom Wanek, Paul Boomer and Dave Young flew in from Columbia, Cleveland and Tucson to hang out with Craig, who mentioned that his daughter, Bridget, was becoming rather good at artistic roller skating, but that the sport wasn’t very well packaged or promoted.

Packaging and promoting are just different names for showmanship and storytelling.

A Tour of Scotland and a comical comment from Indiana Beagle was all it took. Angel Skating^TM was born before the sun went down. An official logo, a cartoon character mascot, a series of domain names and the rules of advancement through a series of “elegance levels” were all agreed upon within 36 hours.

Showmanship and storytelling – packaging and promotion – are what whiskey tasting and roller skating have in common with what you do.

And now you know what we do.

Book a call with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads®, and we’ll hook you up.

Occasionally a client will send a spreadsheet of company statistics and ask me to comment on what I see.

I usually look and see ambiguous statistics but I certainly don’t want to say that.

Discussing business numbers with people is like discussing religion. No matter what you say, you’re unlikely to change their intrinsic beliefs, so I always approach these conversations carefully.

“What do you see?” I ask.

“Well, last year 68 percent of our customers were repeat customers and 32 percent were new customers. Now we’re selling 63 percent repeat customers and 37 percent new customers.”

“What do you think this tells us?”

“It tells us your ads are working!” the client says excitedly.

“Perhaps it does,” I say. “But it could just as easily indicate that our competition is growing stronger or that we have somehow offended or disappointed our old customers.”

My client gave me a confused look, so I continued, “If a smaller percentage of our business is repeat customers, couldn’t this mean that fewer customers are choosing to buy from us again? Couldn’t it indicate that we’ve disappointed them somehow?”

The confused look became a worried look. “But our sales volume has never been higher.”

“I know that,” I said. “But that could mean that we’re bringing in new customers fast enough to disguise the very serious problem that we’re losing our old customers to someone else. After all, you said yourself that our percentage of repeat customers is down.”

“Do you think we have a problem with our old customers?” the client asked, now truly worried.

“Not at all,” I smiled. “I’m just saying that nothing can be learned from the numbers you gave me.”

Not everything that can be measured has meaning.

Many of you are now recoiling in doubt and disbelief. I get that. Like I said, talking about business numbers is like talking about religion.

Here’s how I finished that conversation: “If a company sells a product or service that people buy once a year, what percentage of their customers will be new customers in year one?”

“One hundred percent,” said my client with confidence.

“And if our sales volume doubles in year two and exactly 50 percent of the customers are new customers, what percentage of customers did we retain from year one?”

The client thought for a moment, then said, “If business has doubled and one half of our customers are new and the other half are repeat, this means that one hundred percent of last year’s customers chose to buy from us again.”

I continued, “Sales in year three are exactly triple the sales of year one. One third of the customers are new and two-thirds are repeat customers. What does this tell us?”

Another moment of thought, he answered, “We have 100 percent retention of customers from the first two years.”

That’s when I said, “But someone is likely to point out that your percentage of new customers is falling and they’ll likely interpret this to mean that your ads aren’t working. After all, your sales volume grew 100 percent in year two but only 50 percent in year three and your percentage of new customers has fallen from 100 percent to only 33 percent. You’re now doing triple the volume you were doing just two years ago but these numbers would seem to indicate that you’ve got serious problems with your advertising.”

The client began to smile again, so I continued, “Oh, and I forgot to tell you that this company increased their prices by 12 percent at the beginning of year two, so none of what we just calculated is accurate. And that company has only been in business for 3 years! Your company, on the other hand, has been in business since 1939 and you sell a product the average person buys every 13 years and lots of old customers have died or moved away and new people have moved to town and some of your old competitors have gotten more aggressive while others have gone out of business and we need to factor in the percentage of sales opportunities your salespeople are closing and yes, you’ve also got a brand new ad campaign. If we take all that into consideration – assuming all the data is available and can be trusted – how are we going to calculate it and what do you think we’re going to learn?”

He smiled as he ceremoniously tore up the spreadsheet and said, “We’re making a lot of money and I like the ads.”

“Good. Let’s go have lunch.”

So we did.

When I got back from lunch, two other clients had emailed spreadsheets to me and asked me to comment on what I saw.

Sigh.

To learn more about how we can help you, book a call with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads® today.

Branding – bonding with a hero or a company or other imaginary character – is merely an entangling of identity hooks.

We connect because we are alike.

But where do we gather these identity hooks on which hang our self-definitions?

“The music we listen to may not define who we are. But it’s a damn good start.”
― Jodi Picoult, Sing You Home

Our books and movies define us.

“What makes a library a reflection of its owner is not merely the choice of the titles themselves, but the mesh of associations implied in the choice… A keen observer might be able to tell who I am from a tattered copy of the poems of Blas de Otero, the number of volumes by Robert Louis Stevenson, the large section devoted to detective stories, the miniscule section devoted to literary theory, the fact that there is much Plato and very little Aristotle on my shelves. Every library is autobiographical.”
– Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night, p. 194

“I’m not really sure which parts of myself are real and which parts are things I’ve gotten from books.”
― Beatrice Sparks, Go Ask Alice

Our imaginations define us.

“Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“When you become the image of your own imagination, it’s the most powerful thing you could ever do.”
― RuPaul

Our relationships define us.

“Relationships take up energy; lettinag go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.”
― Meghan O’Rourke

“People leave imprints on our lives, shaping who we become in much the same way that a symbol is pressed into the page of a book to tell you who it comes from. Dogs, however, leave paw prints on our lives and our souls, which are as unique as fingerprints in every way.”
― Ashly Lorenzana

Our beliefs about God define us.

“Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion.”
― Brennan Manning, Abba’s Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

Our weaknesses define us.

“Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.”
― G.K. Chesterton

Our choices define us.

“Identity was partly heritage, partly upbringing, but mostly the choices you make in life.”
― Patricia Briggs, Cry Wolf

“We are not defined by the family into which we are born, but the one we choose and create. We are not born, we become.”
― Tori Spelling

“We are what we love. We are the things, the people, the ideas we spend our days with. They center us, they drive us, they define us to our very core.”
― Daisy Whitney, The Rivals

But what does this mean to a business?

“Branding is not merely about differentiating products; it is about striking emotional chords with consumers. It is about cultivating identity, attachment, and trust to inspire customer loyalty. Chinese brands score low on attributes such as ‘sophisticated,’ ‘desirable,’ ‘innovative,’ ‘friendly,’ and ‘trustworthy.'”
– Professor Nirmalya Kumar, London Business School

“The firmest friendship is based on an identity of likes and dislikes.”
– Gaius Sallustius Crispus, 35 BC

Quirks and preferences, foibles and flaws, these are the essence of branding. They are the feathers and robes of a tribe.

Your mainstream virtues do not define you.

Definitions like “Honest” “Family-oriented” “Success-driven” and “Caring” blur you into the watery crowd, for which of us doesn’t embrace these things?

If you will stand on a surfboard and ride the waves, you must confess your uncommon characteristics.

“Bookworm”
“Poker Player”
“Ballroom Dancer”
“Bow-Hunter”
“Lover of Marching Bands”
“Fantasy Football Freak”
“Singer of Broadway Show Tunes”
“History Nerd”
“Shade-tree Mechanic”
“Aspiring Magician”
“Rescuer of Insects”
“Would-be Inventor.”

Your guilty pleasures are what people remember best about you. They add depth and dimension to your image. They are the identity hooks that entangle others.

They are the feathers of your tribe.

Wear them with pride.

If you need new branding guidance, book a call with no other than Wizard of Ads®. We'll help you figure out what new perspective on branding can work for your business.  

“Bonding” is falling in love with a company, a product, a spokesperson, an outlook, a belief system. This bond of love inevitably manifests itself in a tangible way. And then again. And again.

A bonding ad is about the customer.
A direct response ad is about the offer.

Direct response ads trigger immediate action.
Bonding ads do not.

The results of a direct response ad can be measured immediately. The public either buys what you’re selling or they don’t. This is how you know whether or not the ad is working. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to build your company on direct response.

Bonding ads build customer loyalty.
Direct response ads do not.

Hi Roy,

I have a client who started his radio campaign a few months ago running a low frequency schedule. He is already starting to see the success of his campaign both through website visits and actual inquiries from potential clients. In the beginning his creative was written by us and read by him. He sells life insurance. My client is now concerned with measuring the effectiveness of each ad. He is trying to determine which ads are generating the most website hits and inquiries. He has stated:

“With any direct response ad the trick is to determine wording based on the effectiveness of the ad. If the testimonials are driving the most hits, we should be pushing those. I want every campaign I do to be measurable. Without being able to measure each ad’s effectiveness we are just shooting in the dark. If I look at my website hits for instance, I can see that yesterday I only had 7 hits but on July 8^th I had 39. What ad played on July 8^th to garner such a response?”

Any advice on how to explain why his radio campaign is effective without needing to measure each individual ad for its effectiveness?”

Jon

Jon, the success of a direct response ad is determined by the attractiveness of the offer made to the customer. What offer can this life insurance salesman make? Keep in mind that the offer must be compelling enough to get a person to take immediate action.

This insurance agent’s best hope would be to use radio as a promotional vehicle for content marketing. What insights, solutions or valuable information might he publish on his website and talk about in his radio ads that would cause listeners to immediately visit his website to read it? Without this kind of “content” as bait, his direct response campaign on radio is likely doomed.

Business people are attracted to direct response ads because they want their advertising to function like a gumball machine. “You put in your money and you crank the handle and out come the results.”

In theory, direct response marketing is tidy and scalable and predictable. “Put in a penny and you get one gumball. A nickel gets you five gumballs. Give it a dime and ten gumballs emerge. A quarter? You guessed it: twenty-five gumballs.”

The problem is that this gumball machine called “advertising” never functions quite like it should. Sometimes you crank the handle and get a huge gumball. Sometimes you get a tiny one. Sometimes you get nothing at all.

Even when you’ve found an offer that generates predictable, scalable results – such as the response to that “content marketing” offer we described earlier – you’ll find these results will erode over time. The longer you keep pumping coins into that gumball machine, the less well the machine will work. The gumballs will keep getting smaller and smaller until you finally go broke.

No direct-response ad campaign has ever worked long-term.

Each offer has to be new, surprising and different. And then you must say, “But wait. There’s more! Order now and we’ll include at no extra charge…” This is called benefit stacking.

Remember Columbia House? They did $1.4 billion in 1996 as a result of direct response marketing. Nineteen years later, Columbia House filed bankruptcy. Their 1.4 billion fell to just 17 million in total sales. In other words, the size of the gumball coming out of their “predictable, scalable direct response machine” used to be 8,200 percent bigger.

You could argue that what killed them was the emergence of the internet, but your argument won’t hold water. If Columbia House had built their business around the customer instead of around the offer, they would have become iTunes.

Google just told me iTunes is trending to do $5.03 billion this quarter; more than $20 billion this year.

Apple built iTunes through bonding, not direct response.

The reason gumball people don’t like to invest in bonding ads is because it’s like flying on a commercial jet. You hear a roaring noise as the plane begins to rattle and shake and unsustainable amounts of fuel are consumed and OH-MY-GOD we’re approaching the end of the runway! The client shouts, “This sucks. I don’t like it. Shut this thing down and get me out of here.”

I weep at the number of advertising flights I see aborted. All that money invested and the twitchy little bastards never even left the airport.

If you can find the courage – and fuel – to embrace a long-term bonding campaign, sooner or later you’ll experience a moment called “liftoff” when everything suddenly gets smooth and quiet and the nosecone of the plane tilts sharply upward.

You’re pushed back into your seat as you climb.

Wow. You can see forever from up here.

Goodbye Columbia House.

Book a call with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads®, and let's create those mind-blowing ads.  

You own a business.
You believe in your company.
You believe you deliver a better experience than your competitors.

Is this confidence based on your intentions, your goals, your beliefs, your values and your personal commitment to your customer’s happiness?

It is? Uh-oh.

Judging yourself by your intentions isn’t a danger among friends, because a friend knows your heart even when your actions are inappropriate.

But it is a real and present danger in business.

We judge ourselves by our intentions but others judge us by our actions.

What happens when a prospective customer makes contact with your company? Do they meet your best employee on that employee’s best day? Of course not. They meet your average employee on an average day. Or worse, they meet a below-average employee on a below-average day.

And then you are confused by those negative reviews.

Sad, isn’t it? Your intentions and motivations and personal commitments never quite made it to the party.

Wouldn’t it be great if your employees were consistently delivering the experience you’ve always believed in?

I want to help you make that happen.

The process is called “message integration.”

The key is to take what’s in your heart – your highest and brightest and best intentions – and bury those intentions deep in the hearts of your employees.

Frances Frei, that most beloved of Harvard Business School professors, says,

You can’t change a person’s performance until you first change their beliefs.”

Simon Sinek, in the most popular of all TED talks, says,

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe. In fact, people will do things that they believe.”

Simon Sinek agrees with Frances Frei and I agree with both of them. I’ll bet you do, too. Yet most of the people I’ve met who adored that Simon Sinek TED talk did exactly the wrong thing at the end of those magical 18 minutes. They drew concentric circles, pointed to the middle one and said, “We’ve got to start with Why.”

And each of these fine people walked away from that exercise with something that felt like a fuzzy and ambiguous “unique selling proposition” or worse, a high-tone mission statement filled with words like “honesty,” “integrity,” and “value.”

Right now I’m in the middle of making a video detailing HOW to implement the advice of Frances Frei and Simon Sinek. It’s a delightfully simple and effective technique and I’ve decided I want you to have it.

I’ve also decided I don’t want to be perceived as hanging onto the coattails of Francis Frei and Simon Sinek, so I’m not going to make my video public. Instead, I’ll be sending a private link to all my Wizard of Ads partners and then to all my clients and then to all the alumni of Wizard Academy. Then I’m sending it to everyone who has ever made a cash donation – no matter how small – to our school.

I’m going to request the Wizard Academy donor list from Vice Chancellor Whittington on Friday afternoon, October 15. And then I’ll be sending that private link. (You still have time to get your name on the list.)

It really is a marvelous technique. Chances are, you’ll replace all the content on your About Us page with the results of this exercise.

And that will be the smallest and least important of its uses.

To learn more about how we can help you, book a call with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads® today.

If your sales lead is one hour old, you’re about to make a cold call.

In other words, you don’t really have a sales lead anymore. In fact, if that sales lead was generated online, your contact rate declines by 99 percent – meaning that you’ll reach just one in one hundred at the end of 30 minutes – when compared to responding within 5 minutes.*

One of the unintended consequences of the Internet is that it has trained us to expect instant details when we send the click that signals our interest. If we don’t get answers immediately, we move on to something else.

Are you expecting your customers to be more patient than you are?

You’ve been online for an hour and seen more than 150 page views. What are the odds that you remember what you saw on page 9? Chances are, you made your decision by the time you got to page view 21. Not only is page 9 ancient history, you’ve contemplated and resolved 7 unrelated topics of interest since then.

The web isn’t just changing how products and services are transacted; online connectivity is changing the customer’s attention span and decision horizon, even in categories where the purchase will NOT be made online.

According to Forrester Research, current trends indicate that Americans will spend 370 billion retail dollars online in 2017. That sounds like a lot until you realize that Americans are expected to spend $3.6 trillion on retail purchases that year.

“Oh, well,” you say, “10.3 percent of retail sales isn’t really a game-changer.”

But wait, we’re not done.

Forrester also tells us that an additional 60% of total retail sales will involve the Internet in 2017.

The categories that will be most influenced by Internet research…will be grocery, apparel and accessories, home improvement and consumer electronics, in particular through mobile activity like reading customer reviews while in the aisle.”

60 percent plus 10.3 percent equals 70.3 percent of total retail sales. Do I have your attention now?

Forrester goes on to say,

The categories that have the lowest online sales are also the ones that see the greatest levels of online research. In general, consumers in virtually all categories touch the web during some part of their purchase journey, but web sales (i.e., dollars spent online) tend to be strongest in categories where consumers don’t need to touch the products or have them immediately.”

The lower your percentage of sales online, the more important it is that you give your customers online answers to their questions.

I really hope you’re not saying to yourself, “Well, I’m just going to use my advertising to get prospective customers to indicate their interest, but I’m not going to answer their questions until we’re face-to-face.” Because if that’s your plan…

It would be rude for me to finish that sentence.

Your customer’s decision window is shrinking. If you’re in a business category that transacts little to none of its business online, it’s imperative that your website correctly anticipates and answers your customer’s unspoken questions. Don’t blather on about the things you wish they cared about – even if those are the things the customer really ought to care about – until you’ve first answered the question that’s on their mind.

You must use words in your mass media advertising and in your online copy that target your customer’s felt need.

Notice I did NOT say, “words that target their age group” or “target their income bracket,” or “target their educational attainment.”

When you speak to your customer’s felt need, you’re answering their question, scratching their itch, giving them confidence, making the sale.

Sadly, the most distorted view of any business is the perspective of the expert, the insider. When you’re on the inside, looking out, you see things very differently than the customer on the outside, looking in.

Surround yourself with brilliant minds who care about you, but who are not trapped inside your perspective. Resist the temptation to defend your old ways of thinking by saying to these friends, “But you don’t understand.”

Chances are, they understand perfectly.

Chances are, they’re giving you fabulous advice.

If you're struggling to craft killer direct response ads for your business, Ryan Chute from Wizard of Ads® can help. Book a call.