Gratuitous sorcery and incantations from actual Wizards.

I have a friend who is a famous online marketer. Last week he sent me an observation I found interesting. It occurred to me that you might find it interesting as well.

“Now that targeting is pretty much dead on Facebook and Instagram, I have a theory that the rules of reach and frequency that have always applied to radio will also apply to social platforms as they shift away from micro-targeting and toward looking more like mass media.”
[Frequency means repetition. – editor]

And then he asked a question.

“Can you remind me again what your magic formula is for reach and frequency when buying radio ads? I know this is a bit like someone asking me how to spell SEO, but this came up in a conversation I was having with a buddy the other day and I felt stupid that I couldn’t remember it.”

Happy to help. Here’s what you’re looking for:

APE = Advertising Performance Equation

Share of Voice x Impact Quotient = Share of Mind
Share of Mind x Personal Experience Factor = Share of Market
Share of Market x Market Potential = Sales Volume

1.Share of Voice:  How much of the noise in your category in your marketplace is your noise? (All media combined, including word of mouth)

2.Impact Quotient: The average impact of a message in your category is 1.0. If your ads are 30% better than average, you score a 1.3. If your ads are 10 percent weaker than average, you score a 0.9 … the Impact of your message can accelerate or reduce your Share of Voice

3.Share of Mind is the percentage of real estate you own in your category in the mind of the average customer.

4.Personal Experience Factor is likewise measured with a 1.0 being, “exactly the experience your customer expected.” Anything above a 1.0 is a delight factor. Anything below a 1.0 is depth of disappointment. Online reviews are just measurements of a customer’s Personal Experience Factor

5.Share of Market is your sales volume as a percentage of the total sales available in your category, in your marketplace.

For a message to enter Declarative Memory (mid-term memory – longer than Working Memory – but not yet Procedural Memory, which is involuntary, automatic recall,) a message should be repeated to the same individual at least 3 times within 7 night’s sleep. Further research has lowered this number to as little as 2.5 repetitions per week.

The more memorable the message, the less repetition is required. Therefore, the only way to beat the system (Google) and save money is to create messages that are highly memorable. NOTE: Any limited time offer with a call-to-action is erased from declarative memory when the “limited time” window is closed. This is why you cannot build a brand with Direct Response calls-to-action.

To become a household word and enter long-term Procedural Memory, you need to hammer your message into the mind of your target at least 2.5 per week for at least 3 years. But even then, it will fade within 24 months after your ads disappear, assuming that your ads have only the average 1.0 Impact Quotient. But a message – or an experience – with a significantly higher Impact Quotient can enter Procedural Memory and become automatic, involuntary recall, with only a single repetition. PTSD is an example of this.

The key to absolute category dominance is to elevate your Impact Quotient and Personal Experience Factor to numbers above 2.0.

In other words, you’ve got to have awesome ads and deliver an amazing customer experience.

But you already knew that.

“This is perfect. Thank you. Have any of your partners tested APE in social ads (FB, IG, TikTok, etc.) to see if the numbers hold up? I would have to assume that Share of Voice would be difficult to lock down given that the media is so mass and it’s obviously easier to scroll past a social ad than it is to skip a radio ad, but it would be interesting to run an impression campaign set at 5 impressions per week (2X the 2.5) to see how long it would take to move the needle on overall leads and sales.”

We haven’t tested the APE online. You get to be the official pioneer.

“Game on.”

ONE LAST THING: The reason that so few people lift their companies to the level of category dominance is that they chicken out, pull the plug and proclaim, “That didn’t work.”

Messages written to accomplish Customer Bonding don’t work immediately. Building a relationship takes time.

If you are conditioned to seeing urgent, direct-response ads deliver quick results, you will soon become convinced that your Customer Bonding campaign isn’t working.

The majority will bail out within the first 4 months. I’ve seen campaigns take as long as 7 months before they emerge from the darkness into the sunlight. But once you reach breakthrough, your Customer Bonding campaign will work better and better the longer you keep moving your message forward. And then you wake up one morning and the competitor in second place is so far behind you that they don’t even show up in your rear-view mirror.

Game over.

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

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.