Gratuitous sorcery and incantations from actual Wizards.

The cognoscenti will remember two big statements glittering on the screen behind me during the opening moments of the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop:

“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”
– Niels Bohr, physicist

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, writer

What I’m about to say may prove to be just such a test.
I’m counting on you to possess a first-rate intelligence:

“People love Donald Trump.”
“People hate Donald Trump.”

Those two statements about Donald Trump seem to be mutually exclusive until we realize that neither statement purports to describe ALL people. Different people feel different ways. We understand this when it comes to politics.

But let the discussion turn to advertising and you will soon hear voices begin speaking of Millennials and Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers as though every member of a birth cohort is somehow compelled to make their decisions based on a single, shared set of values determined by the year in which they were born.

It’s like listening to people who believe in astrology. “Your fate is determined by your birthday.”

The only thing weirder is listening to wholesalers and distributors speak of the men and women involved in “B to B” (Business to Business) as if they were an entirely different species. “Roy, I hear what you’re saying about using words as tools of persuasion, but my business is B to B and B to B is different. What can you tell me about selling B to B?”

Blanket statements result from a belief in stereotypes.

Stereotypes are attractive because they allow us to simplify complex realities.

Stereotypes are false categories that allow us to feel good about stupid decisions.

People are extremely different.
People are all alike.

Both of those statements are true.
Both of those statements are false.

How’s that first-rate intelligence holding up?

I’m now going to make 5 true statements. Some will confirm your suspicions and beliefs. Others will stick in your throat like a fish bone, forcing you to cough and sputter.

I apologize in advance.

1. Your perfect “target customer” is probably a false category.

This is one of the two reasons why your advertising is performing poorly.

The first time I visited Procter & Gamble headquarters in Cincinnati, I was greeted warmly and shown the auditorium where I would be speaking. After all the equipment had been tested, my guide asked,

“Do you know the unofficial slogan of our company?”

I shook my head from side to side.

“In God we trust. All others bring data.”

In an August 9, 2016 story in the Wall Street Journal, Procter & Gamble Chief Marketing Officer Marc Pritchard announced, “We targeted too much and we went too narrow.”

Example: Sales stagnated when P&G aimed Febreze ads on Facebook at pet owners and households with large families. But sales rose when the same budget was spent reaching “anyone over 18.”

P&G has been spending hundreds of million of dollars on tests like that for the past two years. The jury has now returned with a verdict: reaching influencers is just as important as reaching the decision maker.

You feeling that fish bone yet?

2. Millennials are easy to attract.

According to an Aug. 5th Daily Beast article by Samantha Allen, one in three young adults is still living at home.

Touchy-feely theorists say this is because “Millennials desire safe spaces.”

When carmakers realized Millennials weren’t buying cars, they appointed “youth emmissaries” who came up with new colors like “techno pink” and “denim.”

It isn’t “fear of commitment” that keeps Millennials from buying houses.

The Economist wondered aloud in June, “Why aren’t millennials buying diamonds?” and speculated it was “the taint of conflict and exploitation” that was keeping them away.

But according to Samantha Allen,

“Millennials are not some vast unsolvable mystery… basic economic math can explain much of the younger generation’s behavior… Cars cost money and millennials have less of it and diamonds are freakin’ expensive… So the next time you have a hunch about why millennials are the way they are, ask yourself if economic insecurity might be a better hypothesis.”

In truth, Millennials are easy to attract. Most of them just don’t have the buying power that most businesses assume they have.

3. Growing companies are desperate to find employees.

Wait. Didn’t we just say that one in three millennials is still living at home because they’re poor? Yes. They’re drowning in college debt because we lied to them. We said a degree was the key to getting a good job. So they got an education but they have no marketable skills.

You would be startled by the number of recruitment ads my partners and I are writing each week for client companies that can’t find capable employees.

If you are a Registered Nurse, a Licensed Practical Nurse or an air conditioning technician, you can walk into any city in America today and instantly get a job making an above-average income. I know this to be true because I’ve spent the past several months scouring the nation for them.

4. Store traffic is down but sales are up.

Last week I spoke with an independent rep that’s been selling upscale brands to major retailers for more than 20 years. “Everyone is terrified at the decline in traffic,” he said, “but sales haven’t really declined at all.”

His experience is similar to my own.

E-commerce is real and it has devastated a few categories, to be sure. But for most retailers it’s just an imaginary boogeyman hiding under the bed.

Retail traffic is declining and service business call-counts are falling because people are doing their information gathering and comparison-shopping online.

They’re not buying online nearly so often as they’re researching online. The result is that a single brick-and-mortar store gets visited instead of three or four. The traffic you’re not seeing is the traffic that went to your competitor.

You’ve got to become the company people think of immediately and feel the best about. This is how you increase traffic.

5. Radio and television advertising are working better today than ever before.

Yes, I’m aware that radio listenership has declined from what it was 10 years ago and that people are using DVRs to fast-forward past the ads on TV.

I also know that entertainment is a currency that will buy you the attention of the public.

Entertainment must – by definition – employ elements that are new, surprising and different.

Private music libraries play the same songs over and over and over. This is why we’re spending less and less time listening to our own libraries of downloaded music.

Do you remember when I said that targeting your perfect customer was “one of the two reasons why your advertising is performing poorly?”

The other reason is that your ads are predictable.

The reason they’re predictable is because you’re telling your prospective customers exactly what you think they want to hear.

Big mistake.

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

I’m betting you’re extremely good at something, perhaps at more than just one thing.

Let’s face it: you’re talented – gifted, in fact – a classic overachiever. But the odds are 7 in 10 that you find it difficult to accept and believe these compliments.

I say this because 70 percent of our population suffers from Impostor Syndrome and it is most common among high achievers, especially people with graduate degrees, college professors on track for tenure, and research scientists. ¹

Isaac Newton, the man who changed the way we understand the universe, who discovered the laws of gravity and motion and invented calculus, suffered from Impostor Syndrome, saying, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” ²

Impostor Syndrome is the blind spot that comes with talent.

Harold Kushner describes Impostor Syndrome as “the feeling of many apparently successful people that their success is undeserved… For all the outward trappings of success, they feel hollow inside. They can never rest and enjoy their accomplishments… They need constant reassurance from the people around them to still the voice inside them that keeps saying, ‘If other people knew you the way I know you, they would know what a phony you are.'” ³

Now here’s the good news: Impostor Syndrome is perfectly normal. What you want to avoid is the opposite, the Dunning–Kruger effect, a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusions of superiority, mistakenly assessing their abilities as much higher than they really are. ⁴

Everyone is messed-up and broken a little. (Impostor Syndrome)
But the most messed-up are those who believe they are not. (Dunning-Kruger)

Scientists Dunning and Kruger believe “the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.” ⁴

In other words, those of us who have Impostor Syndrome see ourselves from the inside, where we stand naked in the shadow of old wounds, past failures and the knowledge of our limitations. But we see others from the outside, where they stand majestic, beautifully illuminated in the bright glory of their successes.

A close friend once asked me to tell him the secret of confidence. “The key isn’t to think more highly of yourself,” I said, “but to quit thinking so highly of others.”

If Dunning and Kruger’s research can be trusted, it would appear that I was right.

This is what I was hoping to give you today:

1. Encouragement.
   Talented people like yourself often feel they’ve just been lucky. But being in the right place at the right time doing the right thing in the right way isn’t luck, it’s talent. Most people have at least one talent. Be happy that you found yours.
2. Normality.
   Seventy percent of successful people wrestle with Impostor Syndrome. See it for what it is and it will disappear.
3. Self-acceptance.
   Yes, you have deficiencies, but so does everyone else. Relax.
4. Self-awareness.
   I said that Impostor Syndrome is a blind spot among people with talent. Hopefully, now that you’ve seen your blind spot, it won’t be a blind spot anymore.
5. Gratitude.
   Open your eyes to your talent and be glad of it. (And if you ever figure out who gave it to you, be sure to thank them for it!)

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

A question I often get from clients is,

"How long will it take before we start seeing results from a brand-forward strategy?"

While timelines may vary, depending on the size of the city, the volume of competitors, the quality of their messages, and your product’s purchase cycle, there is a general timeline to consider.

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Before diving into this timeline, it's important to consider the pre-launch sequence, which typically takes 70–120 days, depending on what needs to be done to launch the brand. Whether you're changing your business name or determining the level of production needed. This process involves:

• Brand Uncovery: 15-30 days, including 1-2 days onsite, depending on travel.
• Market Research: 30–60 days, depending on the scope of work.
• Creative & Media Buy Process: 45–60 days.
• Offline Production: 15 days for radio. 30–60 days for television.
• Online Production (if switching): 60 days.

This means you should plan for roughly 90 to 120 days to develop a completely unique Marketing Strategy before anything hits the airwaves. 

This is by far the most critical time for your brand strategy. It’s essential we take the time to get it right. 

Months 1-3: Initial Launch (Live-to-Air)

• Early Feedback: Your ads go live and start catching the attention of friends and family.
• Brand Association: People begin to recognize and repeat your jingles and slogans.

Months 3-6: Gaining Traction

• Digital Growth: Direct traffic to your website and organic brand search begins to increase. 
• Pay-Per-Click Performance: You'll notice higher click-through rates and lower costs for your ads as long as your digital provider is properly executing an aligned branding campaign.
• Lead Generation: Incoming phone calls and booked leads start to rise. 
• Complaints: By now, some of your audience will be tired of the frequency, or upset that you’ve made them feel. The optimal number of complaints by this stage is not zero. 

Months 6-9: Lift Off

• Virality: Elements of your brand begin to spread organically.
• Sales Impact: The average ticket size increases, and sales cycles become shorter. As demand grows, consider price optimization.

Months 9-12: Solidifying Success

• Team Morale: Employee satisfaction improves, attracting top talent to your company. Keep working at bringing the brand message inside your company to align your message. 
• Growth: As customer load increases, you may need to hire more staff, buy more trucks, and look for larger spaces. 
• Revenue Increase: Healthy growth in revenue compared to the previous year.
• Predictability: Growth becomes predictable and sustainable.

While these benchmarks provide a helpful guide, the timeline for each stage isn't fixed. A smaller budget in a larger city will slow things down. The uncontrollable events affecting consumer confidence will affect results. Capacity or staff and vehicles will affect results. 

A brand fully matures around the 10-year mark, and definitive upward results are going to be most prevalent in the 3-5th year.  

The key is to be consistent and monitor your progress, adapting things to optimize profitable growth along the way. 

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Are you ready to embark on your branding journey? Call Wizard Ryan Chute today.

Norman Rockwell was an illustrator of fiction.

He never showed us America as it really was, but America as it could have been, should have been, might have been. His images caused an entire generation to vividly remember experiences we never had.

Rockwell showed my generation a fictional America and we believed in it.

I don’t want to mention client names and I’m sure you’ll understand why, but my most successful ad campaigns have been built on exactly that kind of fiction.

Not lies. Fiction. There’s a difference.

Fiction is romanticized reality, showing us possible futures and the best of the past, leaving out the dreary, the mundane and the forgettable. It is a powerful tool of bonding. Properly used, fictional characters attract new customers and deepen customer loyalties. But predictable characters hold no interest for us. It is conflicted characters – those with vulnerabilities, weaknesses and flaws – that fascinate us immensely.

A recently published study¹ in The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships suggests that fictional friends may be as valuable as “real” friends, particularly when life-partners watch television shows together.

“…our studies show that sharing the social connections provided by TV shows and movies can deepen intimacy and closeness. Furthermore, watching TV shows and movies together may provide couples who lack access to a shared social network of real-world friends with an alternate means of establishing this shared social identity.

Previously, sharing a social world with a partner has been conceptualized in terms of sharing real-world social experiences.² However, creating these experiences may not always be possible. Fortunately, humans are remarkably flexible in finding ways to fulfill their social needs.³ When people’s need for social connections are undermined, they turn to a variety of social surrogates that provide alternate pathways to meet this need, including comfort food,⁴ photos of loved ones,⁵ pets,⁶ and media like TV shows and movies.⁷“

Recurrent characters in advertising fit into that last category of “media like TV shows and movies.”

In fact, fictional characters shine so brightly in our minds that we have created a word – metafiction⁸ – for those moments when fictional characters become aware that they are fictional.

If you doubt what I say, all you need do is suggest to Indiana Beagle that he isn’t real. You will quickly and painfully be made aware of how real a fictional character can become.

It is the architecture of our brains that makes fiction so powerful.

Humans are the storytelling animal.

You have about 100,000 times more synapses in your brain than sensory receptors in your body. If brain synapses were strictly equal to sensory receptors – which they are not – this would mean that you and I are 100,000 times better equipped to experience a world that does not exist than a world that does. So let’s assume that a single sensory receptor is worth 1,000 brain synapses. Congratulations, you’re still 100 times better equipped to experience a world that does not exist than a world that does.

This was the purpose of today’s Monday Morning Memo:

1. Find some TV shows to watch with your life-partner. The shared experience will be good for both of you.
2. Play with the idea of creating a fictional spokes-character for your company. (If you don’t know how, consider the online classes at AmericanSmallBusiness.org.)
3. Take quality fiction more seriously. Logical, sequential, deductive reasoning is a function of analytical thought, which has its headquarters in the left hemisphere of your brain. Loosely speaking, the left hemisphere of your brain is there to connect you to the world that is, while the right hemisphere connects you to worlds that could be, should be, might be, ought to be… someday. This is where fiction comes alive.

Want to hear something funny? The right hemisphere of your brain doesn’t know right from wrong or fact from fiction. That’s the left brain’s job.

Our belief in fiction is made possible only by the amazing right hemisphere of our brains.

Regardless of whether you believe in natural selection (evolution) as the origin of the species, or intelligent design (God), the wordless, intuitive right hemisphere of your brain is there for a reason.

Don’t diminish it. Don’t disparage it. Don’t try to overcome it.

It’s there for a reason.

Let it do its work.

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

Step right up, ladies and gents! In this eyebrow-raising episode of Advertising in America, we light up the spotlight and take a long, hard look at the smoke and mirrors behind marketing. Are today’s advertisers dabbling in CIA-level mind tricks, or is it all just good ol’ fashioned persuasion dressed in a sharp suit?

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Episode Highlights:

• MK-Ultra: The Government’s Wildest Ad Campaign?
  Pull up a chair as we unpack the CIA’s covert cocktail of LSD, hypnosis, and questionable morals. Operation Midnight Climax (yes, that’s the real name, folks) reads like Mad Men meets a spy novel. Makes you wonder—how far are we willing to go to change a mind?
• Advertising: Subliminal Sorcery or Just Good Timing?
  Admit it—you’ve bought something you didn’t need because the pitch hit just right. That’s no accident, sweetheart. Great advertising isn't hypnosis, it's a well-timed wink to your subconscious.
• You Are What You Buy
  From pickup trucks to pilsners, your choices say more about you than a thousand words ever could. Identity is the real battleground, and advertisers? They’re the cartographers of cool.
• The Secret Sauce Behind Killer Ads
  Forget splashing cash on every shiny media channel. The heavy-hitters focus on emotional triggers, sharp copy, and crystal-clear messaging. Want to sell the sizzle, not just the steak? Start here.
• Why Most Ads Flop (and How Yours Won’t)
  Spoiler: "Great service" and "lowest price" won’t cut it anymore. To make your message stick, you’ve gotta zig when others zag. Make ‘em laugh, cry, or scratch their heads—but make them feel something.
• Consistency: The Unsung Hero of Brand Fame
  You don’t build trust in a day. Hammer your message home with rhythm, repetition, and a little razzle-dazzle. Stay top of mind, and when the buying time comes—you’ll be the only name they remember.

Mind control? Maybe not. But when wielded wisely, advertising sure knows how to bend perception. So, pour yourself a highball, power up the Philco, and tune into this week’s episode of Advertising in America—where the messaging is memorable, and the medium… doesn’t matter nearly as much as you think.

Subscribe, share, and sharpen your brand strategy. It’s a wild world out there—and we’ve got the playbook.

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Welcome to Advertising in America, the podcast, where we meet entrepreneurs, where they're at in their marketing and bust through their bottlenecks, breakpoints, and blind spots. Hosted by Wizards, Ryan Chute, and the Royal Torbay twins. Where we put the fun in marketing fundamentals. Are you ready to dominate your marketplace?

Are you ready for outrageous advertising? Do you want to become a household name?

Brought to you by Wizard of Ads for Services. Visit us at wizardofads.services to book your free strategy session with Wizard Ryan Chute today.

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Ryan: Welcome back! On today's episode of Advertising in American, we're going to delve into the cryptic world of mind control. Are elite advertisers meddling in the dark arts of MKUltra experiments, or is advertising just a colossal scam?

Let’s find out. Mick over to you.

Mick: My friend Steven McQuaid told me about some ad he saw and how it wasn't a good ad. So I asked him, how did he become an expert in advertising?

He said, well, I've been watching commercials and listening to them my whole life. Well, based on that theory, I've been watching videos of Eddie Van Halen my whole life. I guess that makes me a guitar virtuoso. The difference between watching a musician play and watching a TV commercial is that you know one of them is trying to influence you.

Eddie's just playing guitar. Ford wants me to buy a pickup truck. The difference in our knowledge of that difference is everything. I know so little about the electric guitar, I don't even know which end to blow it to, but when it comes to the advertising thing, we know what they're trying to do, when it works and when it doesn't.

If I watch that Ford commercial 87 times and don't buy the pickup truck, how can you call that a success? We're exposed to five times more advertising messages over the last ten years, but we don't buy five times as much stuff. That's proof that even though we've always been good at ignoring advertising, we're actually getting better at it.

Think of the number of ads we're exposed to every day, and consider how many cause us to change our minds, switch brands, or try something that we didn't want to try. It's effectively zero. A rounding error. It isn't just you that isn't affected by advertising, it's all of us.

Claims that advertising doesn't affect me are probably a bit overstated. We all think we're far too smart to fall for advertising. And obviously, if we were all too smart for it, then there would be no advertising industry at all. We'd be a fool to conclude that, everyone is wasting their money on something that's inherently worthless.

But, be careful when you're telling a consumer that you know them better than they know themselves. They will always push back, and they'll be right. They have the data. If I didn't buy that pickup truck, then the ad didn't affect me. That's just how it is. true. 

Ryan: You blow on the tailpipe. Chris, what say you?

Chris: When I hear this old chestnut, I always say, really?

What brand of Nikes are you wearing? Are you driving a Dodge Ram, the most advertised truck in America? Or the Ford 150, the second most advertised truck in America? Where did you make those choices after doing your own research? The simple truth is, the world's leading advertisers are generally creating the world's biggest brands.

Your pitch is, well the advertising seems to be working on hundreds of millions of people, but not my buddy Dave. Really? Of course it does, or millions of companies wouldn't spend billions of dollars in advertising. Corporations are cutting costs wherever they can. You think their high powered marketing departments are all missing out on what Dave figures out turns out advertising doesn't work? What are the odds? Everyone wants to believe it might work on the masses, but not me. They are not the general public. We all like to think we're unique, and that's fine, but put all us unique people together and we behave like the general public and you ain't the exception.

What is more likely the case, is that you often see ads that aren't particularly aimed at you, and when you don't respond, you think that's proof that advertising doesn't change minds.

Every time an ad doesn't work on you, you think you're bulletproof. Well, if you don't like cruises, then sure, a cruise ad won't work. If you're a lifelong Bud drinker, then no, a Miller Lite ad may not make you change brands against your will. But you can be damn sure that the things that are aimed at you work just fine on you.

And one day, when you get bored with Budweiser might very well, try Miller Lite.

Ryan: Chris Torbay, everyone. Less filling, but still tastes great. This whole thing is starting to feel like a Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Stay tuned, we'll be right back after we take these handful of shrooms.

Wow. We're gonna get a lot more interesting.

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Hey, listeners. Wizard Ryan Chute here. Want a personalized strategy that instantly 4X the effectiveness of your marketing dollars? Schedule a free call with me at wizardofads.services. We'll chat about your goals and how you can quickly dominate your marketplace. I have limited availability though, so don't delay.

Well, I guess you could delay a bit, but not too much. That'd be like an over-delay. So maybe you just skip the delay part entirely and book a call just as soon as you're ready to start making money. You certainly don't to delay that, right? And now, pitter-patter.

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Ryan: Fun fact, guys. MKUltra was the most infamous mind control project conducted by the CIA from 1950s to the early seventies. MKUltra involved experiments on unknowing subjects, using drugs, LSD, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and other methods in an attempt to develop techniques for mind control and interrogation.

For example, Operation Midnight Climax was a sub project of MKUltra where the CIA set up safe houses in San Francisco and New York where prostitutes lured the men in. The men were then secretly dosed with LSD and their behaviors were observed and recorded without their knowledge. Now there is another project that they did. Project Artichoke was another CIA project that preceded MKUltra in itself. It explored the use of hypnosis and forced addiction to morphine, other techniques to create amnesia, and controlled behavior. Rumors have it that it'll be the premise of the movie Hangover IV.

Mick: What could possibly go wrong with this plan?

Chris: Imagine going to my client and saying, here's what we're going to do. It doesn't matter what the ad is, but we're just going to give all the viewers morphine first, and then your ad's going to work. Trust me.

Ryan: It's not like any evil villain has ever said, let's poison the water supply. It's definitely a solid plan. Thanks CIA!

Mick: Woo hoo!

Ryan: Hope you're watching and enjoy the show. Mick, you said the other day that no one really wants to admit that advertising works on them.

Mick: Well, yeah, because it makes us sound like we're all just a bunch of marks, waiting for the television to tell us what to do. And there's a certain truth to that. On the other hand, we would also be fools to suggest that we're not influenced by the things that we see and hear every day.

Ryan: Absolutely. We're not naive and gullible to have been persuaded subconsciously or consciously, but yeah.

Chris: And maybe that's it, we would feel like marks if we were admitting that it worked on us against our will. I guess that was kind of part of my point there, is no one is saying advertising works on you whether you like it or not.

We're saying if you are the right person in the right frame of mind, with the right needs, and you don't have a solution to a problem, the advertising will present a solution that you can then choose using all your faculties. Nobody said you're a rat in a maze.

Mick: Well, and also, we have to remember that when we're talking about advertising, there's a baseline.

And the baseline of advertising in pretty much any category, in any market, is a group of people who own businesses saying, here's who we are and here's what we sell. Which is of course, answering two questions that nobody's asking, who are you and what do you sell?

So if that's the baseline is just, we have a product that we are prepared to sell for you and we'd like you to do so that’s not very compelling and anybody could say, well, that doesn't.

Chris: There's no particular reason for me to listen to that.

Mick: Exactly. But if you can create an ad that answers the question that the consumer is really asking, which is why is buying from you, good for me?

If you can legitimately answer that question in a way that makes sense to the consumer, people are gonna buy the thing you're selling.

Chris: Yeah, and I'm therefore not an idiot for doing that. I'm not a sheep. I'm doing it because you said something that was interesting, and I thought through it and said, yes, that's actually interesting to me. And then I made a conscious decision. Well, now, I'm not a sheep. I'm a smart person because I listened to actual information, or it made me want to Google you and then I went to your website and I found out more, and it's like, yeah, these guys totally feel like the brand for me.

Mick: Well, sometimes you've got a category where you have to buy it. Like, insurance, for example, you have to buy this stuff. It's not an option. You can't just say, well, I'm not going to turn my car. So therefore, the insurance company has a different question to answer.

Chris: Yeah. Why you?

Mick: Why you?

Ryan: Right. Well, and Roy always taught us that, look, identity is why people buy. 

Identity is, we're always trying to tell the world who we are, what we are, what we stand for, what we believe in. What our rank, what our class, what our status is within ourselves. Within our individuals that we love and care for, and within the tribes that we care about, our community, our companies, our family. And really what it boils down to is every purchase, regardless of what it is, is us with an internal deep underlying need that says, hey, I need to status up. This is the best choice for me because it improves my rank, the company that I choose to work for. The brands that I choose to put on my body. The woman that I choose to spend my life with. All of these things are just telling the world where you stand amongst the...

Chris: Yeah, I want to be seen as the guy who wears Nikes. I want to be seen as the guy who carries an iPhone. I want to be seen as the guy who drives this, and this vehicle.

Ryan: But not so overt as that, right? We're not doing that out of our egotistical arrogance most of the time, sometimes we are. But there is an aspiration to elevate ourselves up in our own hearts, in our own feeling. At the end of the day, what we're trying to figure out is how do we influence these people to say, I want to stand with that person, that brand, that guy, that woman for what they're selling, right?

That entity, right? Which is our company, our brands, right? I like those colors, I like those shapes, I like the feminine feel of this, the masculine feel of this, the sharp cutting edge of this aesthetic or feel, the softness of this, all of this comes down to representations of ourselves.

Chris: And this goes back to something that Mick said in the previous episode which is, it's not the medium, it's the message, right? It's not that advertising works because advertising works. Advertising works because you've said something that is relevant to that person. And it's not figuring out that you should advertise or where you should advertise? It's what should your message be.

And that's the part that's effective. It's not that if you put something on TV, then mindlessly, people will buy it or come to your store or order your products. The effort goes into what is it that we are going to say to the kind of person that we're targeting, that is relevant to them, that is motivating to them, that is aspirational to them, as you said. And that's the part that works, the strategy and messaging, not advertising. Not the fact that it is a TV ad or a radio ad or a billboard.

Mick: I think the best example of the truth that people buy based on emotion and based on identity, I think beer is the best example of that. Because the fluids are absolutely interchangeable. I challenge anybody to pick their own favorite brand of beer, if I covered them up. But the Bud drinker, when offered a Heineken, will look at you like you're a lunatic.

The Heineken drinker, when offered a Pabst Blue Ribbon, you wouldn't wash his feet in that. The Stella drinker has a certain attitude that is inconsistent with the Miller Lite drinker. It's the same stuff, but people will get angry. They will have emotional response if they're told they have to.

Chris: You have to drink this other brand.

Mick: Yeah, why would I drink that? That's what you get in bowling alleys. It's freaking beer, they'll give you a nice warm buzz,, shut up and drink it. That's not what people actually do, it's provable.

Ryan: The nice thing about Pabst Blue Ribbon is that, somebody already has washed their feet in it before you got it.

Mick: Probably, but you won't notice and that's the important thing.

Chris: I think it was the same problem though, right?

Ryan: That's why people buy Apple products versus Samsung, and that's why we have competitors who literally have the exact same products, but one gets to sell it for more than the other, based off of these alignments that we're looking at. And that's how profoundly important it is to marketing as a whole. If we're glossing over all of it, by asking questions too early too soon, still questions to ask. But what channels should I be on, what should I put on this ad that I'm doing on Google?

We need to step back and really look at, what is the big picture here? What are we trying to do? Are we trying to be the premium product in town? Or in the country? Or in the world? Are we trying to be the low priced provider? Are we trying to do something? Are we looking to take over the world? Or are we looking to dominate our backyard? All of these things have a dramatic effect on what message should be. And from the message, what channels should we be on…

Chris: Those examples that you give, there is no other way for people to find that out about your brand other than advertising. If I am honestly looking for the cheapest water heater that I could possibly get. My water heater just died, I got no money, I want the cheapest possible solution to get hot water back into my house. I can only look to advertising and hopefully, as you say, and find the provider who says we are low cost plumber. 

As soon as I see an ad that answers to that question, I have that piece of information. If I am at the other end of the spectrum and I'm trying to upgrade everything in my house, and I want the best dishwasher and the best this, and I want a shower with eight heads, then what I'm looking for is, show me the plumber who's going to give me the imported Italian faucets with the extra here, and then multiple controls, and it looks like a spaceship in front of my showerstall.

The only way I can do this, I can look to advertisers, which brand is telling me these things about themselves. You cannot find that information any other way. Unless you visit the website of every plumber in town, right? Those pieces of information are not available except in the way that they market themselves.

And then you know, I know what I'm going to get at the Dollar store. Because I know what the Dollar store stands for. I know what I'm going to get from Nordstrom's, because I know what Nordstrom stands for. And all those things come from the way those two companies advertise themselves.

Ryan: The alternative is simple, go to Google, look at how many stars they have, and look at what the star rating is. Basically, most people on this planet are looking at a star rating of something over 4.5, and a company that has an incredible amount of stars is probably going to be expensive. And the ones that have enough stars are going to probably be the most affordable, and I’m going to try them first.

In the majority of cases, and then the ones that have not enough stars, like they're under a hundred, they're the small guy in the chances of getting the kind of quality of service I'm looking for. Equal to that is I'm making assumptions as the average consumer that the big company is going to have a better warranty.

So, I'll go back to your example about the hot water tank and say, yes, I want the cheapest hot water tank. Everything in a grudge purchase, like a car insurance, or a hot water tank, would be transactional in nature, until you give them some other reason for it to be more than transactional, right? 

There is a relational component. And when we think about cheapest costs, we really start to think about the three costs of any human being. The money, the energy, and the time. So, they're looking for convenience before, during, and after the sale. That's a big deal. Because if we're able to articulate that before they get to Google, we have an incrementally, distinctly, exponentially higher chance of them considering us or the alternatives given that, basically, everyone else is pretty much equal.

Chris: Because they already know a little something about us. They know where we stand on those three things that you talked about. And again, the advertising hasn't forced you to make that decision, it's not mind control. But it has primed you for, you know what? I should look into these guys. 

It's interesting, the number of people who say, I did my own research. No one does their own research double-blind and totally dispassionately. They don't Google it, look at the top ten listings, which is already, of course, a sort of some kind, and equally go to the top ten things, and then choose the right one. You don't look at the top ten brands of sneakers and then decide which one you're going to go to. I read about that air suspension thing and I think that Nikes are really the ones for me. No, when you are ready, you maybe have a short list of one or two, and that came from the marketing that they have done over the years.

You may still make an intellectual decision, you may still do some research and go, you know what, now that I think about it, I like what I read about this, when I did a modicum research. But no one goes in cold, and the degree to which you don't go in cold is the advertising work.

Mick: That actually matters more if you are a premium provider, if you're not a low cost provider. If you're low cost provider, your message is very simple. I'm a low cost provider, and I can prove it. That's the only thing. 

Ryan: You’ve met them at transactional.

Mick: You meet them there, and all you have to do is prove that you are, in fact, you will charge the least amount of money for this product or service, and then a certain consumer will purchase from you.

If you are the high cost provider, if you are a premium product, then you absolutely have to consider, what purchasing this brand says about me. When I bought my first BMW, I absolutely said to myself, Huh, I will no longer be driving a Volkswagen. I am now going to be driving a BMW. What does that say about me?

And it's stupid, because we shouldn't be talking about engines, and cup holders, and fuel efficiency, and steering, and all that stuff. But in fact, a major consideration is, this is going to change how I am perceived by others. Where does that shit come from? That comes from marketing. That’s the only place it comes from.

Chris: I used to work on a bunch of major car brands and the most recent was Porsche. And there was an interesting story that we always told people and it's partly on this point, but I'm actually going to make a separate point with it, which is, when most people go to buy a vehicle, they go shopping and they have a short list of between two and three, the average is like 2.7 vehicles.

So, you're gonna go and buy a mid sized SUV or something like that. You go look at the CR-V, you go look at the Ford Runner, whatever the Toyota equivalent is, you probably go look at the Mitsubishi equivalent, you've got this short list. When people buy Porsches, the short list of cars they want to look at is 1.2.

They kinda already know they want to buy a Porsche. They may look at an Audi if they're particularly rich, they may look at a Ferrari, but they basically already know what they want to look at. The fact that a car buyer, ignore for a moment the fact that Porsche marketing has made them fall in love with Porsche since they were a 15 year old boy, and that's why their list is only 1.2.

Even on the other side of that equation, the average SUV buyer has already got a list of 2.7 cars. How did they get down to 2.7? There's 20 different things, they have already cut certain ones off their list, and there are a couple of dealerships that they know they are going to want to go to. They know they're going to want to go to a Honda, Toyota, and then what are the third and fourth? That's the marketing.

The marketing has already shortened their list. They already find a few, and if it's not Honda and Toyota, then it's Mitsubishi and Kia or something like that, it could be a different short list. But no one goes car shopping with a short list and 15 cars.

Ryan: I'm going to be so bold as to say, it's not just the marketing, but it is the brand forward advertising that we're talking about here. Because nobody is getting the impression of a Porsche at that Porsche of Toronto. They're getting their brand impression well before that. 

As you said, Porsche is playing the extraordinary long game here. And most of the small businesses in this universe aren't in the long game. They've just started, they've been around a long time, Heck, we've dealt with clients 38 years in business and nobody knew that they existed. And they thought they had top of market, and they were running $4.5 million. And if that were true, that 38-year-old company would be a top of market at $4.5 million. But today, after two years of advertising with them they're at $16 million and they're on their way to $25 million in market share.

And that shows you the disproportionate power of story, of branding, of embed. I talk about this with my clients all the time. You guys have heard this a thousand times. It's really about the three different areas of the brain. We've got the short term memory, that's like the RAM in your computer, it has a 7 second shelf life, it's going to forget basically the thing that doesn't matter in the first 7 seconds or so. And then there's the stuff where we hit them with a little bit more repetition, maybe a little salience, something interesting, something less predictable. And it goes back into that working memory that lasts about 7 days. That 7 days gets erased by sleep, like defragging an old PC. It's cleaning up the files and getting rid of the old stuff that doesn't really matter a whole lot.

A lot of our clients, they're selling services. They don't want to be remembered, right? The client doesn't want to remember their insurance options or like that new guy that they're not trying, particularly if they have a guy, right? They want to know, what I'm going to be doing for supper tomorrow night or breakfast in the morning. And as we keep pushing forward and pushing forward with more and more frequency, more and more salient message, that Porsche that people fall in love with when they're 12, that's starting to build up in the back of the brain, the chemical part of the brain.

Now, I see every form of advertising, certainly brand forward advertising, from truck wraps and logos, certainly, but billboards, radio, TV, all of these impressions cumulatively are stacking up like bricks. Now, if you have a whole bunch of bricks without any emotion what you have is enough bricks for a pretty solid brick shithouse.

What you don't have is mortar, and mortar is the absolute glue to this. Now, a Stanford study many years ago was researching around PTSD, and some other really dramatic emotional experiences, and they found that the chemical release that came from that, from the emotion, was the thing that created the stickiness, the adhesion, the mortar.

Now, with mortar and bricks, we can build a McMansion, right? So we're going from a brick shit house, a wobbly old house of cards to a McMansion that's glued together with monstrous power of the mortar. And now we have this really stable foundation to live the life in the long-term memory for when we are eventually going to buy this Porsche, and I’ve got to say, I’ve always through you were insufferable, you didn’t need to buy that BMW.

Ryan: Guys, this is a really fascinating conversation and one of the things that I say all the time, that really really resonates with me, I HAVE A GUY. 

Mick: I always have a guy, and that means that this provider or whatever it is, this person's providing matters so much to me that not only do I always go back, but I make other people go back.

Chris: You in fact put your reputation on the line, on behalf of that other guy.

Mick: And if you need tires, you have to get tires from my guy. This is of course the holy grail of what advertising's trying to accomplish and there's an inherent contradiction there. Because when you talk about a person like me who is almost the perfect description of a relational consumer, I will always go back to the same restaurant, I'll always go back to the same tire guy. And I'll become an advocate for the people who I like, right? I've got a guy, I have to buy from my guy.

The inherent contradiction is, how do you get me to change my mind? Because everybody has a provider of everything, and the point of advertising is to get them to switch. What it means is that to get that relational consumer to switch, they won't switch simply because you tell us that we exist.

You have to give me a strong reason why I have to stop doing what I'm doing now and start doing this other thing? Start switching to another guy. Is that easy? No, it's really freaking hard. It takes time and it requires a legitimate reason. You have to answer the question, why should I switch from my current guy to you.

Chris: It's interesting. You say, we have a provider. So, two things. First of all, there are some things which we have a provider, and we are married to it, and we love it, and we're fixated. And then there's others where we're more fluid, right? If I go to the grocery store, there's maybe the bread I'm looking for, but it's the other bread from the competitor next to it, and they got a different something this week. Maybe I'll switch to it. I don't have a brand loyalty on some things. And so, if you put another idea, if I see an ad for something, I should give those a try, it's not like I'm married to my regular brand. 

On the things where I do have a preferred brand, there's always external triggers that might lead you to explore. So, beer is an interesting one. And again, I've worked on a number of the big brands. And there's an interesting thing, you hear this in focus groups, which is you ask somebody, how did they get to be a “such and such” drinker? And the number of times you hear the same story, I used to drink this thing, and I drank it all the time, and then, oh, it just started to make me feel bloated, so I changed brands. You hear it from one brand to another. So there is no beer brand that doesn’t make you bloated verses another. All beer makes you bloated. You drink too much beer, you're going to have a bad experience, and then what happens is that kind of puts them off their brand, because that was the one that gave them the bad experience at that time.

So, you can be a diehard Bud drinker for ten years, and then something happens, you have a bad experience, you know what? Maybe I gotta stop drinking this stuff. And now the door is open, you are super loyal, and there's that opportunity. After watching the competitor's advertising for 10 years, when that trigger comes along, it's an external trigger, then you go, let me try an MGD. And then you have one and you don't feel bloated because you don't have 10, and you go, this is okay, and then you switch.

And equally, there are just as many people who were, the last 10 years have been drinking MGD and then they got bloated, and it's so funny that people do this back and forth. Like I said in the intro, just because you see an ad, you're not going to throw away your preferred brand that's been your preferred brand for a decade. But if anything happens to throw things into chaos, that's when the cumulative effect of advertising actually does give you a next step.

Ryan: Let's think about that from a standpoint of service businesses, as an example because a little more challenging to run the beer company. Not only does there have to have something happen externally, like a trigger has to happen. I need to get my insurance renew, I got into a dispute with my wife and we're fighting over custody. I need to get a hot water tank because I don't have hot water. A trigger happens. If it's Lululemon pants, it's an internally triggered thing, they just want to feel better about themselves. 

The identity part of that whole thing on the externally triggered, particularly grudge purchase side is that I'm going to make the smart purchase decision. I am a good consumer of these transactional things that I want for all intents and purposes to be invisible in my life.

We really start to look at, why does somebody change a brand? In beer, something happened, right? In a hot water tank, something happened. But a whole bunch of your clients already have a guy, right? The devil you know,

Chris: Yeah.

Ryan: That has demonstrated enough empathy and confidence to earn their opportunity again. Until such time as they lose that confidence, right? That comes from empathy and confidence. We then move to the next phase of that mass convenience. And if we don’t have convenience we have exclusivity, and back to identity, in the beer, I might switch from Bud to a Craft beer. Why? It's a premium price, you're paying a higher amount.

It says something about you- it creates and exclusivity, which is identity.

Bud, is  convenient. Because it's consistent, it's true. McDonald's, it's convenient, it's consistent, it's going to give you that same expectation every single time, it's fast, it's reliable, it's the things that you're looking for in various moments.

Mick: It's not the best breakfast sandwich in town, but I can get one in 15 seconds.

Ryan: But it gets it done, right? And that's exactly it. Now they don’t have tea in Salt Lake City, but that’s a whole other story. So, it's deeply valuable for us to understand that we change within ourselves, sometimes we're transactional about things, sometimes we're relational. But we're always going to be transactional until you give us a reason to be relational.

Mick: Given no other data, give me the cheap one.

Ryan: Again, we can pull that lever as well. It's not about only working with the cheap brands in town that's going to get you the business, absolutely not. Cheap falls into what the difference between cheap and low price is? The low price, the low cost, in another perspective, is money, energy, and time, right? Before, during, and after that sale. Again, this convenience thing keeps cropping up as a thing. I will wait for that fancy, special order Porsche to come in.

Chris: I'll wait until I'm old enough that I can afford it. Very few people who are 25 are buying Porsche.

Ryan: I'm willing to own a plethora of cars before that, until I get to my goals and ambitions and dreams, right? But it's an identity piece, it's an element that saying, this is who I am. That hot water tank, if I want an astounding amount of convenience for the longest period of time, I'm very willing to spend more money on that hot water tank. If I had a house full of eight kids, you know I'm buying a tankless water heater.

If I'm looking for better insurance, I'm looking for how I'm going to get taken care of when something happens as much as I'm looking at 15% off or more, right? All of these things start to factor into, what is the strategy? The strategy will inform the message, the message will inform the channels. It’s the strategy.

Strategy without weight, right? If you're a company that has no values, and everyone's going to be up in arms for hearing that and say, of course, I have values.

Mick: We stand for quality, service, selection, price, convenient location, free parking, and professional staff. Here's what it means, don't tell me how it sounds.

Ryan: Table stakes. Table stakes just don't move the meter. There's this bouncer in our brain, just front of the left ear named Broca. And Broca is there to toss out the predictable. This Broca bouncer is not letting you into Club Imagination without doing something new, different, and interesting. If it's predictable, it's not worth investigating, and you're gonna get tossed down the alley.

Once you get into Club Imagination, you've got to say something. You need auditory message. You need some sort of visual impact that pairs you up and brings you up. But you're going to keep dancing and dating and making friends until they need your thing, right?

And in some cases, you're going to get moved into the VIP room, and that's where you have the chance to close those deals, right? But you need to have that bonding relationship that never happened if you didn't get past Broca in the first place.

Ultimately what we're talking about here is making sure that we absolutely do punch as hard as we possibly can with the message, otherwise we are going to lose. But the time and attention of the public, entertainment is the currency that we use, right? Make them laugh, make them cry, make them angry.

Mick: Make them feel something.

Chris: But again, that's maybe the wrap up of it. Just because there's a lot of mediocre advertising, it doesn't mean that the medium is wrong. It doesn't mean that the theory of advertising is wrong. There's lots of stuff that either not talking to me because I'm not the right target, it's not talking to me because it's not the right time, it's not talking to me because it's the same old table stakes things, and so they're undifferentiated from all the competitors. And there's a lot of that stuff out there.And I chalk that up in my head as advertising that doesn't work. That doesn't mean that advertising doesn't work. That's like saying there's no good music out there. No, the stuff that's in the top 40 is pretty good. There are hundreds of millions of things on Spotify and Bandcamp and whatever that are unlistenable. That doesn't mean music is bad, it means it’s not talking to you.

Mick: I would go so far as to say that the fact that most advertising is rubbish, is a tremendous opportunity for the new advertisers. Because all you have to do is beat that and that bar is not high, it's ridiculously low. The trouble is you actually have to do something different. You have to say, what would you put into your advertising if we removed quality, service, selection, price, convenient location, free parking, professionals have to really hear what you need. If you took all of that out, is there anything left?

If not, you've got a problem. If there's something really specific that you can say, this is a thing about us that you can't say about any of the other people in our town who do the thing that we do. You just won everyone!

Chris: Yeah, don't take the advice of the guy who's saying, quality, service, selection, price, convenient, free parking, and his advertising is not working. Don't take his advice, he's the guy who's doing it wrong.

Mick: Use that to beat him.

Ryan: Guys, to sum it up, I think we can all agree. Most ads don't work, pretty much the vast majority, right? Pretty much all. Complete waste of money, and if it's a complete waste of money, don't spend the money. And that's because the writing and the distribution are wrong, right? 

Advertising that gets true results for the companies that deliver an actual solution that stand them 600 feet above the competition. They're actually doing a thing that has them get noticed, right? And they're doing it consistently. Not just different, but distinctive, right? Really doing something that isn't like everyone else. Like all of us, we are all unique. Like l a snowflake, butterfly. That’s like extra unique.

You have to get all the ingredients right to have the Michelin Star marketing plan, right? You really do. And if you're in a category where no one is talking, table stakes are going to work, right? Like when you're speaking into an empty echo chamber, it's pretty easy. You can pretty much do anything to get attention. But if you're up against stiff competition and a grand ambition for your company, this work should not be left to amateurs, salespeople, was that a fair statement?

Mick: The salespeople of the media? Unfortunately, they also work for your competition. It's not actually in that person's interest, crunch your competition and put them out of business. I absolutely want to put your customer or your competitor out of business. I absolutely want to do that. I want them to close, I want their children to not go to college. I want everything about their business to fail, and I want them to live underneath a bridge. Your advertising sales record, the TV station does not have that.

Ryan: That’s not within the spectrum. 

Mick: He’s not nearly as much as an asshole as I am.

Ryan: What it sounds like to me, though, in reverse of that is that you're looking for that person who's going to agonize over every last word, every last dollar, every last impression that the buyer is going to have of your brand in every way. It's the difference between becoming known, in my opinion, and becoming an actual household name too, distinctly different things. People can know your name when you're a household name.

Mick: If we assume that 90% of advertising is rubbish, which is probably a fair number, then that means you have to be in the top 10. And you're not going to get into the top 10 by just saying what everybody else is saying. That's where agonizing over the message and getting it exactly right and saying, it's just not standing out quite right. We need to change this. We need to change that. We need to up our game in the production side.

We need to make it look really good. We need to make it sound really good. We need to take, do another take with that actor to get that delivery just exactly right. It's not by accident, it's by hard freaking work.

Ryan: And people often wonder why our strategies, our creatives, our media strategies all work so well because they work consistently well every single time. And it's to that exact moment, at that exact point that you're making that we're rejecting what you're supposed to hear. We're replacing it with something new and unexpected, something distinctive, not just different.

And then we target bombs the living crap out of the designated target area, regardless of what medium we're using, for what budget we're using with monstrous repetition that is going to get it pushed back into that long term memory that we're trying to take up and build our McMansion in our clients brands. 

If you don't have the right words at the right frequency, your brand only gets so far before it just needs that lift, right? Your trusted brand is only going to get you so far, your logo is only going to get you so far.

Mick: All of those things will get you your fair share. And your fair share is the amount of dollars that are being spent in your category, in your market, divided by the number of providers, and that's not enough to make yourself successful.

Ryan: And that's it, right? If you don't get the basic premise right, you're going to get to a dimension of returns faster, right? You're going to get your fair share. We also have to have those same clients spending that money, investing in it, depending on the size of their cities, we can't do this for free. It's going to take some elbow grease. It's going to take some time. It's going to take some durability in their reasonableness around how long is their purchase cycle? The customer isn't going to be buying your thing right now- all the time. We have to talk to the ones before they get to the Google. So that we can get them feeling good about us, so that when it does come time, we argue.

Mick: When we're in an argumentative position.

Ryan: Yeah. Really fired here, guys. This is really great. Ultimately…

Chris: Advertising does totally work. Who are we kidding.

Ryan: Advertising does totally work.

Mick: Except the part that is rubbish. 

Ryan: The smart stuff is really moving about how gives a shit meter. Let’s move who gives a shit meter, and we have to do this two ways. One, with the words we use, but also, talking to the same people over and over again. Even if it’s a little amount is way better than putting your chips on the roulette wheel, and hoping for the best. 

Until next time, thanks for tuning in.

Thank you for joining us on Advertising in America. We hope you enjoyed the show and captured a nuget of marketing magic. Want to hear more?

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Until next time, keep your ads enchanting and audience captivated.

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Science is the study of objective reality.
Art is the study of subjective reality.

Subjective reality is perception through filters. It is interpreted reality, romanticized reality, imagined reality. It is your own personal fiction.

We’ve spoken of this before, but I think we need a refresher:
Electromagnetic waves exist regardless of whether you perceive them. They are nonfiction. But colors exist in subjective reality, as a result of transformations provided by our senses. Colors are fiction.

Vibrations traveling in air or water are objective, real, nonfiction. But sound is a fiction that exists only in our mind.

Likewise, chemicals dissolved in air or water exist in objective reality, nonfiction. But smells and tastes are purely subjective, fiction. Colors, sounds, smells and tastes do not exist, as such, outside our brains. And any associations we experience in connection with a color, sound, taste or smell are purely subjective as well.

Each of us lives in a private world that is mostly subjective fiction.

Our ability to communicate is based on the assumption that other people will interpret subjective stimuli in ways that are similar to our own. But when their reactions spring from different backgrounds and experiences, communication grows more difficult.

Politics, anyone?

Color, sound, smell and taste are very convincing fictions. So convincing, in fact, that we often embrace them as “reality.” This is why we have so many arguments.

To “frame” a conversation is to set the stage for a fiction that is about to begin.

The current style of communication in America is declarative and descriptive, leaving little room for nuance or multilayered interpretation. The impact of this declarative style is often clinical and bombastic.

The heart doubts declarative statements because they tell us what to think and believe.

Evocative statements pull the answers from inside us.

Lead a person to an answer and they will usually discover it.
Lead a person to the truth and they will cling to it.

We own every truth that comes from inside us. This is why it is rare for an argument to overturn something we have realized.

If you followed Indiana Beagle down the rabbit hole last week, you saw a statement by Brandon Sanderson, “The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.”

Sanderson may as well have been talking about evocative statements.

Look at the frontispiece of The Wizard of Ads and you’ll see The Seven Laws of the Advertising Universe.  Laws 3 and 7 explain why stories are so powerfully persuasive:

“Intellect and Emotion are partners who do not speak the same language. The intellect finds logic to justify what the emotions have decided. Win the hearts of the people, their minds will follow.”

“Engage the Imagination, then take it where you will. Where the mind has repeatedly journeyed, the body will surely follow. People go only to places they have already been in their minds.”

Well-told stories win the heart and take people on journeys in their minds.

How well are you telling your stories?

The best stories have a narrative arc and a character arc.

Narrative Arc: a sequence of events that unfold; a continuing storyline that fascinates the mind.

Character Arc: a gradual deepening of our understanding of the character’s motivations, revealed by how the character thinks, speaks, acts and sees the world. The character arc is a character’s inner journey over the course of the story.

An advertising campaign is more than a series of ads.

A good campaign has a narrative arc that engages the mind of the customer, revealing layer after layer of information about your company, your product, your service.

A good campaign has a character arc that entangles the heart of the customer by allowing them to feel they understand why you do the things you do.

Does your company have an ad campaign, or have you just been running a series of ads?

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