Gratuitous sorcery and incantations from actual Wizards.

When I was growing up, I could never change the opinion of my mother by saying, “But everyone else is doing it.”

My mom had the courage and confidence to believe that Everyone Else’s mother was wrong.

That’s a high level of courage and confidence. I’m hoping that you have it, too.

When I speak to advertising professionals on the subject of advertising, I often find myself having to explain how certain widely-held beliefs are wrong. I will patiently produce the evidence, the case studies, and scientific documentation. In most instances, the audience will concede that I am right. Then someone will say, “But everyone else is doing it,” as though it is impossible for “everyone else” to be wrong.

Here’s an example: most people believe in tightly targeting the right customer. They are convinced that the secret of successful advertising is to “reach the right people.”

I believe targeting is essential if you are in a business that sells to other businesses.

If you sell computer chips, you need to reach computer manufacturers, so send a letter, an email, a salesman to knock on their door. If you sell cardboard boxes by the traincar load, you need to reach companies that sell things packaged in cardboard boxes. Send a letter, an email, a salesman to knock on their door. The world of B2B lives and dies with their ability to “reach the right people.”

But when you are selling a product or service to the public, “targeting the right customer” works only about 10% better than reaching the untargeted masses.

If the cost of targeting is less than 10% higher than the cost of not targeting, go ahead and target. But I am confident you will find that targeting usually costs considerably more than that.

“But everyone else is doing it.”

Please excuse me while I bang my head against the wall.

1. Nielsen is the highly scientific organization that measures television and radio audiences.
2. D2D is cloud based, and leverages open source technology designed to collect, manage, and analyze complex data.
3. Les Binet is a highly respected data scientist.

In the summer of 2020, Les Binet published a huge, long term study on the effectiveness of marketing. Here is one of the many things he learned:

“In many ways, online marketing and online media has done itself a disservice by focusing on targeting more than reach. A couple of very interesting studies are out there. One was a study by Nielsen, about the relative contributions of reach versus targeting in effectiveness, and they concluded, with a survey of about 500 econometric models, that targeting only adds about 10% to the effectiveness of the campaign on average. A very similar result came from some work by D2D, where they looked at over 200 econometric models, from a wide range of categories, and they concluded that targeting of a campaign adds only about 10% to effectiveness. So the same numbers, two very different methods.”

Have you been following the news about Phenylephrine, the decongestant that was proven to be ineffective in 2007 and in multiple studies since then, but is still on the shelf 16 years later?

According to a recent news story by Sarah Zhang,

“Americans collectively shell out $1.763 billion a year for cold and allergy meds with phenylephrine, according to the FDA, which also calls the number a likely underestimate. That’s a lot of money for a decongestant that does not work.”

Generally speaking, I’m in favor of government staying out of the way of business, but this seems to be a case where the Federal Trade Commission might ought to step in and say, “Guys, you need to quit lying to the public.”

“But everyone else is doing it.”

One last example: Google, LinkedIn, and every other seller of pay-per-click will aggressively argue that you need to include their “expanded network” to achieve the lowest cost-per-click. What they are telling you is absolutely true as long as you don’t mind paying for clicks by bots.

Industries with the highest rates of click fraud include photography (65%), pest control (62%), locksmiths (53%), plumbing (46%), and waste removal (45%).  [data provided by clickcease.com]

Let me be clear: I do not believe – even for one second – that Google or LinkedIn or any other major seller of pay-per-click advertising is directly involved in a scheme to sell bot-clicks. But have you ever looked into exactly who and what constitutes an “expanded network?” You really should, and I hope you will. When you have gathered the facts, I believe you will probably opt-out of all the expanded networks offered by the major sellers of pay-per-click.

But please know in advance that when you do this, alarm bells will go off and each of those sellers of pay-per-click advertising will tell you that I don’t know what I’m talking about and they will passionately argue that you are making a horrible mistake because, “everyone else is doing it.”

Did you know there are a variety of services that can identify, track, and block bots from clicking your online ads?

You didn’t know that? Well, it’s probably because, “no one else is doing it.”

There are more than 6 million businesses in America, but the largest of those bot-tracking and bot-blocking companies [cheq.ai] has only 15,000 customers.

I’m convinced the sellers of pay-per-click ads are perfectly willing to let you buy bot-clicks from their expanded networks for the same reasons that all the drug companies are willing to sell you Phenylephrine.

It is entirely possible that I am a cranky and catankerous old man, and that everyone else is right.

So I’ll let you look into these expanded networks and decide for yourself.

Does that sound fair?

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

Ninety percent of motorcycle riders who attempt this corner at 100 mph crash and die, so 9% of riders who attempt it at 10 mph will also crash and die, right?

The fact that you answered silently ‘No’ indicates that you instinctively understand the concept of an inflection point.

Somewhere between zero and 100 mph is the inflection point where crashes begin to occur, and every mile-per-hour above that inflection point increases the likelihood of a crash.

Although we instinctively understand the reality of the inflection point when reducing from the greater to the smaller, we somehow believe things are infinitely scalable when moving from the smaller to the greater.

If we can navigate the corner at 77 mph, then we can do it at 78 mph. And if we can do it at 78 mph, we can certainly do it at 79 mph. And if 79 is doable, then so is 80, right?

I’m talking to you about lead generation for your business.

A few days ago, I was having a conversation that I find myself having far too often. I have an acquaintance in the air conditioning business who told me he was planning to increase his Google budget. He said,

“If I increase my Google budget by 50%, I’ll get 50% more leads.”

He’s been in business about 11 years and is a major player in his city, so I asked, “During peak season, how many calls do you get on the average day?”

He told me the number, then I said, “Now think of all your competitors and estimate the number of calls they could possibly be getting. Give it some thought. Don’t leave anyone out.”

I gave him time to think, then said, “Add that call volume to your call volume. Now tell me, what is the largest possible number of people that could possibly need air conditioning service during peak season?”

He gave me a number. I asked, “Is there any way it could be higher than that?”

“No.”

“Peak season has been over for awhile. How many clicks are you currently buying each day?” His eyes got big and he said,

“I’m already buying more than 3 times that many clicks every day! How is that possible?”

“Are you asking me how it is possible that a finite number of people in your city are in the market for your product today, but the number of clicks available today is infinite? Is that what you’re asking?”

He shook his head yes, so I told him the answer.

I run into the same problem when talking to clients about radio ads. They say,

“Every time I have increased my radio budget, my sales have increased. So I want to increase my budget again.”

“It won’t do you any good.”

“But it has always worked in the past.”

“It won’t work this time because you are already reaching all the people who spend enough time listening to the radio each week to make it possible for you to reach them with sufficient repetition. The only people left are the ones who don’t spend enough time listening. We’re going to have to add a new media: TV, or billboards, or maybe direct mail.”

“Will it work as well as the radio?”

“Of course not. Because we’re at an inflection point.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re already reaching 39% of your city with enough repetition for those people to know who you are and what you do and how you do it and why they should choose you. So whatever media we buy next, you’ve got to keep in mind that we’re already reaching 39% of those people with relentless repetition on the radio. The best-case scenario is that you’re going to see about 60% as much business growth per ad dollar as you’ve seen in the past.”

No one wants to hear that.

People want to believe that everything related to business is infinitely scalable. But there is always an inflection point when lead generation becomes more expensive.

The happy times are when you reach that glorious inflection point when things really begin to take off. Like when you are far enough into a 52-week TV or radio campaign for the public to have heard enough about you to finally start choosing to buy from you.

Sadly, this TV/Radio inflection point is usually somewhere between week 13 and week 26. Not always, but usually. Most advertisers don’t stay with it that long, because most advertising salespeople don’t have the courage to tell them it’s going to take that long.

The exception, of course, is when you have an urgent message about a limited-time offer. Those ads usually start working much sooner.

Problem solved, right? Just run direct-response ads with an attractive offer and a strong call to action!

But inflection points in advertising are funny:

1. Anything that works quickly, will work less and less well the longer you do it.
2. Anything that works better and better the longer you do it, will always seem, at first, like it’s not working at all.

Book a call with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads® today.

If you win the heart, the mind will follow. The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided.

In 1981, Dr. Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize for his documentation of brain lateralization, which basically says that we don’t have 1 brain divided into 2 hemispheres as much as we have 2 separate, competing brains.

The LEFT hemisphere is the home of rational, logical, sequential, deductive reasoning. Think of it as the Intellect; the Mind. It puts you in touch with this world and leans toward suspicion and doubt.

But the RIGHT hemisphere does none of those things. Think of it as the Heart. It understands the six sub-languages in the language of music; pitch, key, tempo, rhythm, musical interval and musical contour. The right hemisphere puts you in touch with a world that could be, should be, ought to be, someday.

HOPE is alive and well in the right hemisphere of your brain. It understands symbols, and assigns meanings to shapes and colors. The logic of the right hemisphere is intuition, gut feelings, and hunches.

Your body contains 100 million sensory receptors that allow you to see, hear, touch, taste and smell physical reality. But your brain contains 10,000 billion synapses. This means you are approximately 100,000 times better equipped to experience a world that does not exist, than a world that does.

Call 1-800-Got-Junk.

Life is happier
when it’s less cluttered.

Your house will be bigger.
Your teeth will be whiter.
Angels will sing.

You’ll be a better dancer.

Magical Thinking is a style of writing characterized by elements of the fantastic – woven with a deadpan sense of presentation – into an otherwise true story.

Now this is where it gets really interesting; the right hemisphere of your brain doesn’t know fact from fiction or true from false. That’s the left brain’s job. This is why you can enjoy books, movies, and TV shows that you know are fiction.

Magical Thinking is a style of writing that is full of HOPE.

Magical Thinking doesn’t talk about the frustration of a situation or the pain of a problem. It illuminates a happy world in which anything is possible.

Magical Thinking offers the customer an effortless, frustration-free solution.

Employees, your boss wants you to know:

“If you answer the phones for our company or knock on the doors of customers, please know that you are a vitally important part of the advertising and marketing team. Our customers expect you to be the living embodiment of our advertising; cheerful and helpful and magically able to make their problem disappear. We will become giants if we act like the company we claim to be in our advertising.”

Magical Thinking
makes
Magical Advertising
makes
Happy Customers
makes
Business Grow.

Book a call with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads® today.

Every good story – and every good ad – begins with a statement that triggers more questions than it answers.

“I do not like to turn left when leaving my neighborhood…”

“I was a 10-year-old boy holding a flashlight for my father…”

“You are sitting in a candlelit restaurant when you hear a strange noise…”

The second line of your story is where the narrative arc begins. The narrative arc is the sequence of events, the plot. [In a radio ad, sfx means sound effect]

You are sitting in a candlelit restaurant when you hear a strange noise
[sfx-open] and the walls are instantly covered with jagged shards of golden light.
You hear another strange noise
[sfx-close] and the jagged shards of light are gone.
Murmurs of wonder flood the candlelit restaurant.
[sfx-open] The jagged shards appear on the walls again, dancing in unison to some silent music that only they can hear.
[sfx-close] And now they are gone.
The crowd applauds this unexpected delight. Smiles are beaming. Teeth are bright.
[sfx-open] More jagged shards. More golden light.
[sfx-close] No one notices the man at the table in the middle of the room, staring at his tablecloth, lost in thought. A woman emerges from the shadows behind him. Startled, he looks up, drops to one knee,
[sfx-open] and the golden shards of light dance fast and bright across his face and hers.
And then they kiss.
And the candlelit restaurant explodes in applause.
[sfx-close]  A tiny little box sits empty on the table.
Flickering Firelight™ diamonds, available exclusively at Morgan Jewelers.

Begin your ad with a statement that triggers more questions than it answers! If your opening line reveals what is to come, change the opening line.

“Guidomeyer’s Furniture is having a sale!”

When an ad begins with a sentence like that, you can be sure it was written by someone who follows the 5 W’s of journalism: Who, What, When, Where and Why.

Ads written by journalists are why most people hate advertising.

Guidomeyer’s Furniture is having a sale!
This week, Guidomeyer’s is having a sale
at 1715 Barkmaster Avenue! Save! Save!
Save up to 50% this week at Guidomeyer’s
annual clearance sale! Guidomeyer’s has been
serving the needs of Pottersville for 71 years,
so come to Guidomeyer’s and shop local
for all your furniture needs! We have recliners,
coffee tables, end tables, nightstands, TV trays
and financing will be available! Guidomeyer’s
Annual Clearance Sale! This week! 1715 Barkmaster!
Hurry, hurry, hurry before all the good stuff is gone!
Guidomeyer’s!

1. Guidomeyer is who.
2. A Sale is what.
3. This Week is when.
4. 1715 Barkmaster is where.
5. Annual Clearance is why.

That formula is so simple an idiot could use it. And idiots often do.

No, I don’t mean that. Words have meanings, so let me be accurate. I don’t think such a person is an ‘idiot.’ ‘Moron’ would be the accurate term. Technically, a moron is an adult with the mental age of 7-10. Morons are more intelligent than idiots and imbeciles, but they are an especially troublesome group because they are not aware of their shortcomings.

Don’t be a moron.

Getting the listener’s attention is easy, but holding that attention requires skill.

1. Open with a statement that triggers more questions than it answers.
2. Bridge quickly into the narrative arc, the plot.
3. When your listener thinks they know where you are headed, take them somewhere else.
4. Introduce divergent elements that don’t belong together,
5. then make them converge, add up, and make sense.
6. Lead your listener to the conclusion, then allow them to discover it on their own. Don’t tell them the answer. Let them hear it in their mind.
7. Leave out the irrelevant, the predictable, and anything that makes your ad sound like an ad.

Poetic meter makes words musical.

To achieve it, arrange the drumbeats of the stressed and unstressed syllables of your words so that they create a percussive rhythm in the mind. There are a couple of dozen rhythms that are easily achievable in English.

The simplest of those – anapestic meter – is two light stresses followed by a heavy third stress.

pum-pum-PUM-pum-pum-PUM- pum-pum-PUM-pum-pum-PUM

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn has blown,
For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And so there lay the rider distorted and grey,
And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
So I walk by the edge of a lake in my dream.

It is easy to become a musical writer. All you have to do is spend time reading the words of the great ones.

Don’t read ads. Read the poems, short stories and novels written by the winners of the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes in Literature.

“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.”
– Ernest Hemingway, the opening lines of A Farewell to Arms

“I read that paragraph and I want to cry. It’s incredibly beautiful. He broke every rule. All the repetition! In four sentences the word ‘and’ appears 15 times. What’s going on is just an unforgettable display of rhythmic mastery. There’s a kind of, almost a kind of hypnosis, an incantation that is about the frame of mind you’re going into the war with.”
– Stephen Cushman, Literary Scholar

“Listening to Bach – and recognizing the repetition of particular notes in Bach – inspired Hemingway to write A Farewell to Arms.”
– Miriam Mandel, Literary Scholar

Take another look at Hemingway’s opening sentence and notice the questions it raises: “In the late summer of that year (What year?) we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. (Where are we?)”

You can do this. None of it is beyond you. Morons will tell you that you’re doing it wrong, but your ads will take your listeners on a marvelous journey, and your clients to heights that no other ad writer can take them.

Unless you work with seasoned marketers with rich experience writing irresistible advertising, like Ryan Chute’s teams at Wizard of Ads®. Book a call.

Rugged individualism is the essence of America.

It is also the reason that we, as a people, feel isolated and lonely.

Our focus on personal, individual success is the reason we feel disconnected from one another. This is happening even in our marriages according to Ian Kerner, author of the book, So Tell Me About the Last Time You Had Sex, and Terrence Real, author of Us: Getting Past Me and You.

“Individualism is not a natural fact; it has a history. In American Colonial days, society was communalism on a small scale. It was about farms and small towns and small villages. When you lived face to face with your neighbor, it was a palpable reality that the good of all was the good for each of us. Civic virtue was the force that went beyond individual gratification. It was part of being a civilized person that you had a sense of civic virtue. With the Industrial Revolution, and the myth of the self-made man, all of that went by the wayside and it was each man for himself.”
– Terrence Real

We are living in a very conflicted time because most of us hold two conflicting beliefs. (1.) We believe in a culture of individual achievement, “ME”, (2.) but as we approach the zenith of a societal “WE”, there is a desire to find our tribe, to join, to belong, to work as a group for the common good.

Next year is the zenith of our current “WE.” It happens once every 80 years.

The previous “WE” zenithed in 1943 when America was united against Hitler. We threw ourselves into something bigger than ourselves; something we believed in, something that satisfied our need to belong and make a difference.

And now you know why we see all those deeply impassioned splinter groups in the news each week.

Here’s the good news: you can harness that same “need to belong” to recruit and retain good employees.

Good employees are attracted to companies with a strong culture. They are looking for a company they can believe in, a place where they can belong and make a difference.

When you want to strengthen your company culture, you need to publish your Unifying Principles. I have previously called these your “We Believe” statements.

Publishing them is the easy part. The difficult part is that you have to live them.

About eight minutes into his famous TED-X talk at Puget Sound, Simon Sinek says,

“The goal is not just to hire people who need a job; it’s to hire people who believe what you believe. I always say that, you know, if you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money, but if they believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.”

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

We learn more from our failures than we learn from our successes. Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from bad decisions.

My friend is forever shouting about his Freedom. It is the only song he sings.

Freedom is a good thing, but our love of freedom is why family sizes are shrinking. Children are a responsibility.

Freedom and Responsibility are paired opposites, a duality. The more you have of one, the less you have of the other.

I had written only those few words when I received a request from the American Small Business Institute to answer a question from Glenn in Calgary; he wanted me to predict the Top Five Qualities of an Advertising Consultant in 2023.

I had the Freedom to answer however I wanted. I could be flip, funny, cute, self-serving, dismissive, scholarly, insulting, pedantic, or predictable. My Freedom was unrestrained. But I also had the Responsibility to give Glenn a list of five specific, attainable goals that would make him and his clients more successful.

I told Glenn the Top Five Qualities for 2023 would be these:

1. Ability to write good ads. I’ve never seen a business fail due to “reaching the wrong people.” Businesses fail because they say the wrong thing.
2. Knowledge of how to differentiate a business from its category. You must make your client’s business distinctive and memorable.
3. Honesty. You must be willing to accept responsibility for the failure of your ad campaign.
4. Courage to say what needs to be said to the business owner. This is how you avoid campaigns that fail.
5. Wisdom to know that good advertising will not fix a broken business. Choose your clients carefully, Glenn.

Depression and Joy are another duality. The more you have of one, the less you have of the other.

Pride – the inability to feel grateful – is what keeps us from feeling joy. The disembodied voice that tells us we need to be “proud, self-made men and women,” is the devil who robs us of our joy.

Depression is unfocused anger. Joy is unfocused gratitude. The more you have of one, the less you have of the other.

If you look for reasons to be angry, you will find them. If you look for reasons to be grateful, you will find them.

Don’t be angry. Be grateful.

Justice and Mercy are a third duality. And the tug-of-war between them is intense.

The only hard choices in life are the choices between two good things.

Justice and Mercy are both good things. When you encounter the tug-of-war between them, which one do you favor?

Opportunity and Security, a fourth duality.

When Opportunity increases, Security declines. This sounds like Risk and Reward, but it’s not. If Risk and Reward were a duality, increasing your risk would decrease your reward. But increased risk of failure increases potential reward. This makes Risk and Reward a synchronous potentiality contained entirely within the realm of Opportunity.

Ultimately, it all comes down to Choices.

Our plan is always to make good choices, not bad choices. But most choices are neither good nor bad in the moment we make them. They become good or bad in hindsight. They become good or bad due to consequences. The outcome is never clear until after the show is over.

We learn more from our failures than we learn from our successes. Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from bad decisions.

You cannot judge a person’s experience by their age. You can judge it only by what they have experienced. A person can have 30 years of experience, or they can 1 year of experience 30 times.

Which will you have? Will you choose to embrace risk and take your beatings when you fail and learn hard lessons and win great victories? Opportunity is a good thing.

But then again, so is Security.

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