Gratuitous sorcery and incantations from actual Wizards.

1. Bad ads waddle like a porcupine and make lots of little points.
   Good ads charge like a rhinoceros and make a single point powerfully.

This is true regardless of your choice of media.

2. Ad budgets are like that, too.

When universities ask me to address their Advertising & Marketing majors just prior to graduation, I always warn those young “advertising experts” never to give advice to friends or family members who are involved in a local business. “This is because everything you have been taught assumes you will go to work in marketing for a Fortune 500 company, or for an advertising agency that places the media for large, national brands. You have not been taught how to grow a local business.” And then I ask their professors – in front of the students – whether they agree or disagree with what I just said.

One hundred percent of the time, without exception, every professor has agreed with me. Most of the time, they start nodding their heads in affirmation when I say, “…everything you have been taught assumes you will go to work in marketing for a Fortune 500 company…”

3. The most dangerous of these Fortune 500 concepts is the idea of a “media mix.”

The widespread belief about the value of a “media mix” has caused small business owners to sprinkle their ad budgets across several different media because they are worried they are going to “miss” someone. After all, “Not everyone listens to the radio.” “Not everyone watches the news.” “Not everyone looks at billboards.” “Not everyone blah, blah, blah.”

Advertiser, you can’t afford to reach everyone. You’ve got to choose who to lose.

Would you rather reach 100% of the people and convince them 10% of the way, or reach 10% of the people and convince them 100% of the way?  Repetition is effective. Repetition is effective.

Don’t be a porcupine. Be a rhino.

4. If you sell a product or a service that most people will need sooner-or-later and you suspect you’ve been sprinkling your ad budget, “a little bit here and a little bit there,” try spending 80% of your ad budget on a single mass media and the remaining 20% online. The choice of mass media is up to you, but it’s hard to go wrong with local broadcast radio or television newscasts. People rarely record the TV news on their DVRs. They watch it live. The same is true of live sporting events.

By the way, in case I forget to tell you this later, repetition is effective.

5. “Wait a minute,” you say, “you told me to be a rhino and not to sprinkle my budget, but now you’re telling me that 20% of my budget should be spent online! What’s up?”

Google is the new phone book, so you must have an online presence. Properly used, mass media will make you the provider that people think of immediately and feel the best about, but the first thing those people are going to do when they need what you sell is go online to look for your phone number, or your store hours, or your street address, or at your online reviews.

You’ve got to show up when your customer is looking for you.

6. There are instances – particularly in the home service categories – when it makes sense to use geotargeting. If time and energy are an underutilized resource, the placement of door hangers and lawn signs and the slipping of flyers under windshield wipers are old-school techniques that still pay big dividends. This is what I call, “shoe leather on the sidewalk.”

The geotargeting of neighborhoods can also be done online, and geofencing will even allow you to target the people who enter and exit a specific building. Cool, huh?

7. “But what if I sell a product or a service that only a tiny percent of the population will ever want or need?”

Friend, that’s when you bet your entire ad budget online. But make sure that your gross profit margin will allow you to spend 25% to 33% of total top-line sales on advertising, because when all the shouting is over, that is what you’re likely to spend.

(Meanwhile, those local advertisers who are betting on the effectiveness of mass media are spending only 6% to 12% of total top-line sales on advertising.)

8. Mild surprise is the foundation of delight.

In your ads,
A. if you say what your customers expected you to say, they will be bored.
B. if you make unsubstantiated claims, they will not believe you.
C. if you speak to anything other than a felt need, they will ignore you.
D. if you say something new, surprising and different, you will gain their attention.
E. if you give them reasons to like and trust and believe you, they will.

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

10. Repetition is effective,
repetition is effective, repetition is effective.

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

An overwhelming force enters the marketplace.
A train is coming. You wish it wasn’t.

1. Will you stand on the track with your back to the train and deny its existence?

This business owner is saying, “Their customer is not our customer. They will not affect us.”

He is doomed by his delusion.

2. Will you denounce the train to everyone who will listen?

This second business owner says to state and local government, “We don’t want them here.”

He may win a battle or two, but he will always lose the war.

3. Will you face the train with one foot on each rail and say, “Bring it on”?

This third business owner is saying, “I’m better at this than you are. I’ll make you regret coming to my town.”

I’ve occasionally seen this business owner defeat the giant, but only if the giant was sick, distracted, or not in the mood to fight. Usually the little guy loses.

There are two proven ways to defeat a giant:

1. Go where the giant cannot.
Trains run on rails. The rails dictate where the trains go.

Sam Walton was a small-town retail hustler in a hillbilly state. The giants who occupied the promised land were Sears, Kress (K-Mart), and J.C. Penney.

Big department stores need big populations. As a general store, Sam could operate profitably in towns too small for Sears, Kress, and J.C. Penney. Sam opened his first stores outside of Arkansas in Sikeston, Missouri and Claremore, Oklahoma; towns of about 10,000 people.

Sam Walton grew Walmart to $8 billion – a size equal to Coca-Cola at the time – before he opened a store in a town large enough to have more than one McDonald’s.

2. Let the giant show you the way.
Stand alongside the track and grab hold of the train as it passes. This is a strategy that businesses owners 1, 2, and 3 never considered.

Once aboard, stand between the train cars where you don’t have to fight the wind. Let the train cut a hole in the wind for you. You are riding in the slipstream. Haven’t you seen race cars pull up tight behind the leader and ride along in their slipstream until the time was right to slip to the inside and slingshot past them?

Walmart was slow, but they did act in time. They studied Amazon and saw what was working. Then they committed to upgrading their online shopping experience.

They allowed the giant to show them the way.

Wal-Mart wasn’t able to slingshot past Amazon,* but they were able to retain their status as a giant. They did not become a has-been like Sears, Kress, J.C. Penney, or Blockbuster Video.

Is there a train headed your way?

What is its name?

What is your plan?

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

The advice I give to others, I rarely take myself.

I admonish persons who possess detailed knowledge to “dumb it down” so the rest of us can understand because, frankly, we are rarely interested in the mystery and wonder of the unabbreviated truth.

I tell them, “Say it so plainly that you worry you have stripped it of all its truth and beauty.”

I tell them, “Simplify it to such a degree that any person who understands the subject as well as you do will think you’re an idiot.”

That’s how you make things clear.

Today I take my own advice.

1. If you want to be bigger, advertise as though you were bigger. Don’t calculate your ad budget based on the volume you did last year. Base it on the volume you hope to do this year.
2. They call it “mass media” for a reason: it reaches the masses. Consequently, you can’t really target using mass media. (TV, radio, billboards)
3. But don’t worry about that. Use mass media anyway. Targeting is overrated and ridiculously overpriced.
4. Choose Who to Lose. Correctly-written ad copy will filter out the customers you don’t want and attract the customers you do want.
5. Filtering through ad copy is how you “target” when using mass media.
6. Two ways to use mass media:
   (A.) Used consistently, mass media will cause your company to be the one customers think of immediately – and feel the best about – when they finally need what you sell.
   (B.) Used short-term, mass media will give urgency and importance to a special event when you purchase high repetition for a period of time, usually between 1 and 14 days.
7. Google is the new phone book. Like the Yellow Pages of yesterday, it is the principal resource for buyers who are currently, consciously in the market for a product or service and have no preferred provider. Like the White Pages of yesterday, Google delivers your telephone number, street address, (and business hours) to customers who have already chosen you as their preferred provider.
8. Customers who come to you through mass media will often be credited to your digital efforts due to the “White Pages” function of Google. They had already chosen you as their preferred provider, but were looking online for your street address, phone number, or business hours.
9. Regardless of how you win them, it is costly to win a first-time customer. Getting that customer to come back a second, third, or fiftieth time is cheap and easy if they had a good experience the first time.
10. Advertising is a tax we pay for not being remarkable. So be remarkable! This is what generates word-of-mouth. You’ve got to impress your customer. If you don’t, your competitor will.
11. Companies that celebrate their victories have happy employees. So find things to celebrate. Happy employees create happy customers.
12. Most customers are repeat customers or referral customers. Mass media is the most efficient way to maintain top-of-mind awareness among these groups. In addition, it will bring you new, first-time customers.
13. Your plan to stay in touch with your customers through social media and email blasts is based on the assumption that your customer is willing to open, read, listen to, or watch what you have to say. Is this actually happening? And if not, why not? (HINT: The Subject Line gets people to open it. The content, itself, gets people to share it.)
14. Thirty-six years ago (1983) David Ogilvy was speaking of newspaper and magazine ads when he wrote, “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” Now look at your open rate. What percentage of your online budget has been spent when you’ve written your subject line?
15. If you have nothing to say, don’t let anyone convince you to say it. Boring, predictable messages make you seem smaller and duller and waste your money. Companies don’t fail due to “reaching the wrong people.” Companies fail due to saying the wrong things.
16. Predictable ads are about you, your company, your product, your service. Persuasive ads are about the customer, and the transformation your product or service will bring to your customer’s life.
17. “I, me, my, we, and our” are self-centered words.
    “You and your” are customer-centered words.
18. Entertainment is the only currency that will purchase the time and attention of a busy public. Are your ads entertaining?
19. One of the most common mistakes in advertising is to spread your ad budget across several different media so that you “don’t leave anyone out.” But persuasion – in most instances – requires repetition and familiarity. Would you rather reach 100% of the people and convince them 10% of the way, or reach 10% of the people and convince them 100% of the way? Don’t spread your money too thinly by chasing the unicorn of “media mix.”
20. Expensive rent = cheap advertising. Intrusive visibility – a landmark location with signage that’s noticed even when people aren’t looking for it – is the cheapest advertising money can buy.  This is true for service businesses, too, not just retail. The extra cost for this kind of location should be taken from the ad budget.

These answers are not comprehensive. But to explain the nuances and exceptions to each of these 20 statements would require more of your time and attention than you probably wish to give me.

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

I began losing my hair when I was 19. By the time I was 21, I looked like I was 30.

Best thing that ever happened to me.

People take you seriously when you look like a grown-up, and I needed people to take me seriously.

I sold advertising for the smallest radio station in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We were rock-solid at number 23 in a city of 23 radio stations. We had a 0.5 share during the Average Quarter Hour. This means that out of every 200 radios that were turned on, only 1 of them would be tuned to my station.

Best thing that ever happened to me.

At any given moment, my station would have between 500 and 800 people listening. But the total number of different people we would reach in a week was about 18,000. Woo-Hoo! I was overjoyed. There wasn’t a single business in our city of 1,000,000 people that couldn’t use 18,000 more customers.

All I had to do is figure out what to say to get my 18,000 people to remember – and prefer – my advertiser. I cannot say with certainty how I knew success would be found in the crafting of a persuasive message rather than in the selection of the “right” audience, but my memory shows me a young boy sitting in an empty classroom reading books during recess rather than playing with the other kids on the playground.

Best thing that ever happened to me.

Yes, I know I’ve said “Best thing that ever happened to me” three times and they can’t ALL be the “best thing,” but I don’t feel like ranking them “#1 Best,” “#2 Best,” etc., so go with the flow, okay?

I restricted my sales calls to businesses that were so tiny they couldn’t afford any advertising other than my little nothing of a radio station. When these people believed in me and wrote me a check, they were giving me their life’s blood. If my plans for them failed, my clients couldn’t pay the rent. They couldn’t send their kids to school with a sack lunch. They couldn’t pay the electric bill.

When you face those kinds of consequences, you lie awake at night figuring out how to make the ads you sold work, because there is no one with whom you can share the blame. It’s all you.

Guilt, Pain and Remorse are powerful teachers.

I quickly figured out how to make advertising work.

And what Guilt, Pain and Remorse taught me was very different from what is being taught in colleges.

Few marketing professionals will ever be solely responsible for the outcomes of the ad campaigns they help to create. Most people in my profession go to college, get a degree, and then become a cog in a marketing machine. Their failures can be attributed to a wide variety of forces beyond their control. Their ink pens are never filled with the blood of the families for whom they write.

My station owner was hoping our little station might bring in about $11,000 a month. Within 18 months, my personal billings were averaging $51,000 a month. My base pay was $800/mo. and I made a 15% commission.  Do the math.

I spent my early twenties as a joyously married, rapidly balding boy with ten thousand stories in his head and an ink pen full of blood in his pocket. Then, at 26 years old, they made me the General Manager of a much larger station.

Worst thing that ever happened to me.

I no longer spent my days talking face-to-face with business owners and crafting stories. Instead, I stared blankly at spreadsheets and spoke by telephone with corporate officers and bookkeepers and listened to the whining of 32 employees who had me confused with their mommies.

Six months into it, I said, “You can keep the cheese. Just let me out of the trap.”

With the unwavering support of Princess Pennie, I became an independent ad writer and media negotiator. I adapted my stories to fit billboards on the highway and TV ads during the Superbowl and websites on the internet.

But some things never change. Thirty-four years after saying “no” to spreadsheets and corporate politics, my relationships continue to be one-on-one with business owners, never with the companies they own.

I don’t believe in destiny.
I believe in choices and consequences.
I believe each of us chooses what we become.

What have you chosen to become?

If plan A isn’t working out for you, consider plan B or C or D!

New choices bring new consequences.

Isn’t life a wonder?

Don’t forget to live it.

If you aren’t a showman or a storyteller, you’re still in good company. Wizard of Ads® can help you create the brand or marketing story you need to drive your user experience. Book a call.

Your body doesn’t have a single immune system; it has a bundle of them. And the most powerful of these systems is the one that rejects foreign tissue. This is why doctors do everything they can to suppress it during transplant surgery.

That suppression doesn’t always work.

When the cells of your body detect an intruder cell – “This is not like me, and I am not like it!” – they employ powerful forms of rejection.

Your company employs a body of people who work together and each employee is like a cell within that body.

And when a new employee comes and goes, they say, “He never really fit in.”

This is why onboarding and enculturation should begin while the candidate is reading your job posting. When you’ve been taught how to write ads for employment, your ads will repel the people you don’t want while powerfully attracting the people you do want. When the right people read your ad, their hearts will whisper, “These people are like me, and I am like them.”

Branding is nothing more than corporate culture made known.

Good advertising promises or implies a specific kind of customer experience. It is then up to your people to deliver that experience.

Your people are the essence of your brand.

The most valuable skill a businessperson can have is the ability to recruit and retain good people.

Did you hear that?
Did you?
I just heard ten thousand successful people quietly whisper, “Amen.”

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

Wizard Academy began with an itch and an image.

I got the itch in Tulsa in 1978 when I was 20 years old.
I saw the image online in 1994 when I was 36.

The itch was to help little businesses succeed.

The image was of a boy sitting beneath the stars with an open book in his lap. The crenels and merlons in the battlements beyond him suggested that he was sitting on the top of a castle tower.

Looking at that cartoon image on my computer screen, I knew I was going to build that tower.

I know this makes me sound crazy, but there have been a handful of moments in my life when I quietly but suddenly knew what was going to happen. I’m not talking about premonitions or visions or dreams or hopes or wishes. I’m not talking about goals or goal-setting. I’m talking about knowing something as surely as if it had already happened.

Did I mention that I know this makes me sound crazy?

I was 13 when I saw a photograph of Pennie Compton and knew that I was going to marry her. The two of us had never met. A few months earlier, I had been flipping through a 1963 Reader’s Digest atlas of the world when I noticed a city – Austin – in the center of Texas. I remember raising an eyebrow when I suddenly knew I would move there someday. The sequence of events that would cause these things to happen remained an absolute mystery to me. But the outcome was never in question.

So I knew I was going to build that tower. But I had no idea why.

My 1978 itch to help small businesses grow led to a string of remarkable successes. By 1992 I was traveling 40 weeks a year teaching ever-larger groups of business owners how to lift themselves to higher levels of success.

I hated it.

Dorothy was right, “There’s no place like home.” I’ve suffered from separation anxiety throughout my life. Travel, for me, is “the little death.”

“Honey,” said Pennie in 1993, “let the people who want your help come to Austin. Schedule a monthly class in our conference room and if someone wants to come to it, they can come.”

When we outgrew that conference room we began to rent the ballrooms of luxury hotels. By the time we paid for those rooms and rented the projection equipment and bought the coffee at $60 a pot and fed lunch to all our guests, we were spending about $20,000 per event to host these classes.

Did I mention that we weren’t charging anyone to attend the classes, and that we had no capacity to serve additional clients?

So we built a new headquarters building for our marketing business with a large, open room on the second floor that we could use as a classroom. That worked for about 2 years.

Then we built a classroom building next to the main office building. That bought us an extra 4 years.

Then, in 2004, Pennie said, “Honey, I found some land we should buy.”

“Why do we want to buy some land?”

“We’ll build some stuff for ourselves on one half of it, and then donate the other half to Wizard Academy and let the school become whatever it wants to become.”

When she showed me the land, I smiled. There, on the top of that majestic plateau was the tower I had seen 10 years earlier. It wasn’t physically there, of course, but I knew that someday it would be.

If you have a crazy image in your mind of a possible future, an inexplicable guiding star that encourages you in the dark moments and lights your way one step at a time, never forget that you have a tribe, and they’ve built a fascinating place for you to come when you need guidance or instruction or fellowship or encouragement.

Do you have an idea? An itch? A hunger?
Do you see something that no one else can see?
Are you willing to leave a trail of sweat and tears and dollars behind you as you struggle to make it real?

Welcome to Wizard Academy.
You, my friend, are exactly our brand of crazy.

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