The Wizard Academy tower sits on a plateau 900 feet above the city of Austin. The view from the stardeck is stunning.

When you attend our free public seminar on the afternoon of March 17, you will be in Tuscan Hall just 500 feet from the tower. If you have some extra time on campus, perhaps Dave Young will be willing to press the button that lifts you from the underground art gallery up to the stardeck so that you can look around.

This is what I will teach you in Tuscan Hall:

1. How to create a magnetic personality for your brand. It’s easier than you think.
2. How to use personification to breathe life into all your corporate communications, beginning with your advertising.
3. How to use character banter and magical thinking to help customers understand that your company has beliefs, values, motives, can make choices, and that it has life.
4. How to gather these techniques into an operating plan that will integrate this magnetic new personality into every touchpoint of your business.
5. How to measure the trajectory and momentum of your rejuvenated brand.

You’re going to have a good time. I will include lots of examples of PowerSelling ads that have lifted people to new heights.

Q: PowerSelling. What is it?

A: PowerSelling is an advertising technique that makes your name the one people think of first – and feel the best about – when they need what you sell.

Q: Does it work for B2B? (Business to Business)

A: Not really. B2B requires tight targeting and significantly more logic than is required to win the hearts of the public. [NOTE: If today’s memo feels different than the typical Monday Morning Memo, it is because this is probably the first example of B2B writing that you have ever seen me write. Are you noticing the additional logic? – RHW]

Q: Does it work for Direct Response offers?

A: No. Direct Response offers are built almost entirely on features and benefits, the so-called “value proposition,” enhanced by an urgent call-to-action, usually with a final bit of “added value” if you “act now.”

Q: So what’s it good for?

A: PowerSelling is for products and services that have a long purchase cycle and a relatively high price tag; things like diamond engagement rings, legal services, medical services, and home services like plumbing, air conditioning, roofing, and electrical. PowerSelling is strictly B2C (Business to Consumer) and it almost always employs mass media; television or radio, sometimes with billboards added.

Q: Will there be recordings made, or perhaps a livestream?

A: Sorry, but no. The Wizards of Ads® have little desire to debate – or educate – a world full of traditional ad writers that have been trained on the tripe that is taught in college.*

You are going to learn the explosive techniques that will make your advertising leap off the launchpad with fire and smoke as you begin your journey to the stars. You will feel your acceleration grow to the point where your cheeks are pulled back and your eyes become slits as the corners of your mouth touch your earlobes.

Or maybe you are just smiling.

If you are ready for the ride of your life, be in Austin on March 17th.

Roy H. Williams

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“Running a big company is like...

Your heart tells you who you are. Your heart contains all your beliefs.

PowerSelling radiates outward from the pulsating fact that people don’t bond with companies; people bond with people; personalities that share their beliefs.

Your company needs a personality if you want your customers to feel a connection to it. Does your company have a personality?

Are you communicating that personality in your advertising?

Personification puts the power in PowerSelling.

When you speak about something that cannot think as though it can think, you are using the art of personification.

“The shattered water made a misty din.

Great waves looked over others coming in

and thought of doing something to the shore

that water never did to land before.”

When you speak about something that cannot ask questions as though it can ask questions, you are using personification.

“My little horse must think it queer

to stop without a farmhouse near

between the woods and frozen lake

the darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

to ask if there is some mistake.”

When you speak about something that cannot move as though it can move, you are using the art of personification.

“It rained endlessly and the forests wept.

The darkness fell and the trees moved closer.”

When you can breathe life into something that is not alive, you are a god.

Robert Frost and John Steinbeck were able to provide us with those examples of personification because they are Nobel Prize-winning writers. But we couldn’t write like that, could we?

“Your house will giggle with glee when it sees the smart thermostat you bought for it.”

Your logical mind tells you that your customers wouldn’t fall for that, but they’ve been falling for it all their lives. Superman is merely ink on a page or pixels on a screen, but your customers know that Superman can fly, squeeze a lump of coal into a diamond, and that he is in love with Lois Lane.

The book of Genesis tells us that God spoke our universe into existence, then it tells us that we are made in the image of God.

Did it ever occur to you that you speak new worlds into existence in the minds of others every time you describe a possible future?

Personification is powerful because it uses magical thinking to open a portal into that world of imagination where hope is alive and well and singing in the shower, where the glass slipper fits the foot of Cinderella, and a wooden puppet named Pinocchio becomes a real live human boy.

I am now going to shake you by the shoulders to wake you up. What I am about to say is hard to hear, but I am saying it because I love you: If you believe a brand is a logo, a color palette, a slogan, a visual style guide, and a company name that people have heard of, then your company is just another dreary, drab, and bland corporation in an ocean of bland corporations. Your company has no soul.

Remember: People don’t bond with companies; people bond with personalities that share their beliefs.

PowerSelling happens when you win the customer’s heart, knowing that their mind will follow. Their mind will always create logic to justify what their heart has already decided.

This is what you must learn to do if you want to create a bond with your customers:

1. Breathe life into your company through the skillful use of personification in all your corporate communications, beginning with your advertising.
2. Employ magical thinking to deepen the public perception that your company has beliefs, values, motives, can make choices, and that it has life.
3. Bond with customers who believe in the

Curiosity is a beagle running through the forest with its nose to the ground.

Curiosity is the cure for boredom. There is no cure for curiosity.

Curious, I asked, “How did the Kardashians become famous?” I wish I hadn’t.

“Through different ventures, several members of the family have assets of over $1 billion. Kim Kardashian became a celebrity in 2007, after selling a pornographic film featuring ex-boyfriend, singer Ray J, which enabled the family to rise to stardom.” – Google

The reason I asked Google, “How did the Kardashians become famous?” is because I was talking with a client last week when I said, “Vulnerability – letting people see you ‘real’ – is the only currency that can purchase real trust.” Then I spontaneously added, “You have to choose between being vulnerable or going full Kardashian.”

I thought I had invented a new phrase, but as it turns out, “going full Kardashian” was already a thing.

Google has its own definition of what it means to “go full Kardashian,” and Indy posted that list in the rabbit hole for you.

But this is my list:

1. If you believe, “Whoever dies with the most toys, wins,” you are in danger of going full Kardashian.

People are more important than possessions.

1. If you believe that looking good is more important than doing good, you are in danger of going full Kardashian.

Beauty, fame, and wealth are outside your skin. Kindness, generosity, and joy are within.

1. If you believe it’s okay to do things that are unethical, immoral, and destructive as long as you are doing nothing illegal, you are in danger of going full Kardashian.

A society grows great when old people plant trees under whose shade they will never sit.

I try to surround myself with tree planters. Jeremy Grigg is one of them.

In our weekly Friday gathering of like-minded men, Jeremy said,

“When a business is evaluating whether or not they can trust you, the attributes they are measuring are, 1. Ability, 2. Integrity, and 3. Benevolence. These are their unspoken questions: ‘Are you good at your job?’ ‘Will you tell me the truth?’ ‘Are you truly trying to help me?’ Most of us focus on ability to the exclusion of integrity and benevolence. After all, when you are petitioning to win work, you want to make sure that the person who can do it for you is actually competent at their job. But in the longer term, honoring your promises, which is integrity and most importantly, giving a damn about the success of what they’re trying to achieve is what really determines whether you are the sort of long-term partner that they’re looking for.”

Jeremy is an international consultant to multibillion-dollar IT services companies.

Natalie Doyle Oldfield studies the drivers of customer loyalty and business growth. She says that half of all customers are willing to pay more for the same product or service if the seller has earned their trust. According to Natalie, “Trust is the critical value that top companies rely on to secure their market dominance and drive their growth.”

I know for a fact that what Natalie is saying is true.

I’ve been helping people do it for more than 40 years.

Roy H....

Last week’s Monday Morning Memo included a photograph of a diamond pendant and the promise of a $1,000 cash prize to whoever could use AI to write the 60-second radio ad that would sell the largest number of that pendant for Valentine’s Day.

I was given that photo by a jewelry client. In a moment we will look at the 60-second radio ad I wrote for the client before I issued the AI prompter challenge. But first, here are 10 things I have learned from the advertising results (and lack of results) I have seen during my 40 years as an ad writer.

1. The most effective ads don’t sound like ads.
2. Most jewelry ads are filled with cliches and schmaltz.
3. The Large Language Models used by AI are educated by the most often used phrases.
4. This is why jewelry ads written by AI are filled with cliches and schmaltz.
5. Most of the ads written by AI are better than what the average citizen would write.
6. The average citizen has not received specific data about the results delivered by each of the thousands of ads they have written during the past 40 years.
7. My challenge to AI prompters included a photograph of the pendant, but none of the ads written by AI were specific to that pendant.
8. Specifics are more persuasive than generalities.
9. The non-specific ads written by AI sold only the idea of a diamond pendant; an idea that can be fulfilled by any diamond pendant sold by any jewelry store, anywhere.
10. Advertisers who use these “generalized” ads are not advertising for their store alone, but for all their competitors as well.

Q: Would the AI radio ads “work”?

A: If what you mean is, “Would they generate a result?” Then yes, but that result would not be the highest and best use of your ad dollars. Not by a long shot.

AI is great at a lot of things, but effective ad writing is not among them.

Radio cannot reveal visual images except in the imagination. That’s what makes radio the perfect medium to deliver this ad. It is the radio ad I wrote to sell that specific pendant:

JACOB: David, have you seen it?

DAVID: Oh yes! I’ve seen it.

JACOB: What did it say to you?

DAVID: There is only one thing it CAN say.

JACOB: Sometimes an artist will say something incredibly specific without using any words at all.

DAVID: We’ve all heard music that can tell a story without words.

JACOB: And we’ve all seen paintings that can tell a story without words.

DAVID: But this time a jewelry designer did it.

JACOB: The moment you see it, you know what it is saying.

DAVID: I understood the message immediately.

JACOB: [slowly] “The long and the short of it is we’re in this together.”

DAVID: “The long and the short of it is we’re in this together.”

JACOB: It has wit, and whimsy, and humor, and warmth

DAVID: and commitment.

JACOB: It made me smile when I saw it.

DAVID: Me, too.

MONICA: [SFX cell phone ring] Hello.

SARAH: Did they see it?

MONICA: Oh yes, they saw...

The General Social Survey has been conducted every second year since 1972 and the most recent one contained both good and bad news about us.

GOOD NEWS: Our bonds with our families and friends are as strong as ever.

BAD NEWS: The bridges we once extended to strangers have collapsed.

Jesus talks about a socially unacceptable “Samaritan” man who sacrificed his time, energy, and money to help an unconscious stranger who had been robbed and left to die at the side of the road. According to Jesus, two different religious people had already seen the wounded man, but crossed over to the other side of the road so they could pretend they hadn’t seen him.

They saw a stranger in need and felt nothing.

Empathy – feeling the pain of others – is the price we pay for being fully human.

The internet promised to bring us closer together through instantaneous, worldwide, one-on-one communication.

But then came the algorithms, those digital sheepdogs that segregate us into echo chambers where every voice we hear sounds exactly like our own.

The easiest way to build an online audience – or a church – is to criticize and demonize “them,” the people who are “not like you… not like us.” Algorithms will help you do this. All you have to do is craft a message that says, “All the world’s problems are caused by ‘them,’ and it is up to ‘us’ to save the future, and America, and the world, from ‘them.'”

You don’t build bridges to people that you believe are “getting what they deserve.”

Generosity and Inclusion are the tools of peacemakers.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” – Jesus

David Brooks recently posted a YouTube video that will make you feel wonderful and give you hope.

I hope you will invest the time to watch it. In fact, I challenge you to watch the first 3 minutes. The odds are extremely high that you will happily choose to watch the remaining 18 minutes.

That YouTube video is titled “David Brooks: Making People Feel Seen: How to Do It Right.”

I’m betting it will be your favorite 21 minutes of the week.

It will also be a signal to the algorithm that you are headed in a new direction.

Merry Christmas.

– Roy H. Williams

“If people looked at the stars each night, they’d live a lot differently. When you look into infinity, you realize that there are more important things than what people do all day.” – Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

John Steinbeck wrote a letter to Carlton Sheffield about a conversation he’d had with his wife, Elaine.

“Once I said to her, ‘I don’t want the barbarity of funeral for myself.’ And she said, ‘Don’t be silly. A funeral isn’t for the dead. You’ll simply be a stage set for a kind of festival, maybe. And besides, you won’t even be there.'”

– Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, p 829

Henry Fonda – one of the most famous actors of his generation – stood up at John Steinbeck’s funeral and recited a piece of a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson:

Bright is the ring of words

When the right man rings them,

Fair the fall of songs

When the singer sings them.

Still they are carolled and said –

On wings they are carried –

After the singer is dead

And the maker is buried.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

We know Henry Fonda spoke those words because Elaine Steinbeck, John’s wife, describes the scene in a letter to her friend, Jean Vounder-Davis.

What will people say when you are gone? Will memories of you ring like bells in the hearts you left behind?

How will you be remembered?

You cannot build a reputation on what you intend to do.

The saddest eulogy ever carved on a tombstone said, “He Had Potential.”

Will you be remembered for having a lot of money?

“You can have money stacked to the ceiling, but the size of your funeral will still depend on the weather.” – Chuck Tanner

Will you be remembered as a selfish person, or a generous one?

“We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.” – Winston Churchill

I have never seen a hearse pulling a U-Haul trainer.

“We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.” – Paul’s letter to Timothy, ch. 6

Will you be remembered as a critical person, or as an encourager?

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou

There is nothing standing in the way of you being a different person today than you were yesterday. Do you remember what I wrote to you in last week’s Monday Morning Memo?

“Escaping the past is easy. The hard part is choosing to start over.”

If we make the right decision, we’ll have more to be thankful for next Thanksgiving than we did this year.

Ciao for Niao,

Roy H. Williams

Douglas Katz is a West Point graduate, a disabled Army veteran, and a culinary enthusiast (also known as a foodie.) Douglas, like many other people who suffer from limited mobility, struggled to use kitchen utensils that require upper extremity strength. Aided by an army of friends and military veterans, Doug retreated to his workshop to invent a new type of kitchen knife, the first in a series of “adaptive” kitchen products he plans to introduce. Doug is building a cutting-edge company (pun intended) dedicated to radical innovation and inclusive kitchen design. It’s happening and it’s happening right now, with roving reporter Rotbart and you at MondayMorningRadio.com.

The future is unknowable. The past is unrecoverable.

If you are anxious, you are living in the future.

Don’t live your life in an imaginary tomorrow. Find joy while it is still today.

If you are depressed, you are living in the past.

Escaping the past is easy. The hard part is choosing to start over.

Let me give you The Seven Secrets to Crystal Days:

1. Do not let the perfect become the enemy of the good.
2. “Perfectionism may look good in his shiny shoes but he’s a little bit of an asshole and no one invites him to their pool parties.” – Ze Frank
3. Good enough, by definition, is good enough.
4. Learn to celebrate the ordinary.
5. “Celebrate! Celebrate! Celebrate!” – Dewey Jenkins
6. Success and failure are temporary conditions.
7. “Do not let either of them define you.”
8. The most precious thing you can find is a friend.
9. “A friend is always loyal, a sibling that helps in times of trouble.”
10. Hatred is the only luxury more costly than an enemy.
11. “Hatred is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”
12. All the little things in life add up to your life.
13. “If you don’t get it right, nothing else matters.”

Autumn is upon us. Cold air sweeps summertime over the hilltop fast and sharp like an old woman sweeping dust out a doorway. The dust washes the landscape with brown and orange, speckled with rusty red, the colors of old cars whose enamel has been erased by the rain in the junkyard of time.

I suspect Solomon wrote the book of Ecclesiastes in the autumn. You remember what he wrote, don’t you?

“Everything has its moment.

There is a moment of ripening and a moment of falling away.

A moment of being born and a moment of dying.

A moment of planting and a moment of harvest.

A moment of killing and a moment of healing.

A moment of destroying and a moment of building.

A moment of weeping and a moment of laughter.

A moment of sorrow and a moment of dancing.

A moment of scattering and a moment of gathering.

A moment of togetherness and a moment of distance.

A moment of finding and a moment of losing.

A moments of grasping and a moment of release.

A moment of ripping and a moment of sewing back together.

A moment of silence and a moment of speech.

A moment of love and a moment of hate.

A moment of fighting and a moment of peace.”

Autumn walks among us, quiet and invisible, like a Mexican ghost on the Day of the Dead.

This is the time of year when I become reflective.

Perhaps you do, too.

Roy H. Williams

Andrew Matthews has inspired more than 1,000 global corporations, including Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Honda, and Citibank. In addition to that, Andrew and his wife produce uplifting books that have sold over 8 million copies in 70 countries and 48 languages by presenting timeless wisdom in fresh, engaging ways. This week, Andrew reveals his creative process to roving reporter Rotbart and explains how anyone – even you – can use that process to connect, inspire, and succeed in every nation of the world. Wouldn’t this be a great day to stop and recharge your batteries at MondayMorningRadio.com?

My observation during the past 40+ years as an ad writer has been that television and radio professionals spend so much time trying to sell television and radio ads, they have no time to learn how to make those ads work.

When you know how to make ads work, and can prove it, television and radio are incredibly easy to sell.

Instead of asking a salesperson to help you with your ads, let me tell you everything you need to know.

“Q” represents your unspoken questions.

“A” represents my answers to those questions.

Q: Who should I be targeting?

A: I’ve never seen a business fail because they were reaching the wrong people. But I have seen lots of businesses fail because they were saying the wrong things in their ads.

Q: Are you saying you don’t believe in targeting?

A: The most effective way to target is to write ad copy that speaks directly to the felt needs of your customer. Targeting isn’t accomplished by reaching the right address, but by demonstrating to people that you feel the way they feel, and that you believe the things they believe.

Q: Are you saying I can write ads that target specific types of people in mass media?

A: Yes, but you get a lot more than that. Mass media reaches not only your target; it reaches all the influencers of your target. Is there anyone that you don’t want to know you, like you, and say good things about you? Every person is an influencer, and decisions are never made in a vacuum.

Q: If targeting the right person is no longer my primary objective, what is?

A: You want to become the solution provider that people think of first and feel the best about. When you say the right things to the largest number of people you can afford to reach with sufficient repetition, you become a household word.

Q: Which media will work best for my business?

A: The media doesn’t make your ad work. Your ad makes the media work. The media is just a vehicle that delivers your message, your ad. The wrong message will fail in every media, and the right message will work in every media. It is the message, not the media, that either works or does not.

Q: Is there a proven way to create the right message?

A: Win the heart and the mind will follow. The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided.

Q: Can you give me some specific tips?

A: Sure. Here are 4 of them.

1. Talk to the customer about what the customer already cares about. Most ads answer questions that no one was asking. This is why people hate most advertising.
2. Always say something new, surprising, and different. Never say what people expect you to say. Predictability is what makes ads sound like ads.
3. Don’t just describe the process of what you do and how you do it. “We use only the freshest ingredients, and everything is made from scratch.” The process is informational. The outcome is motivational. Describe the outcome. “Food so good your head will explode.”
4. Bad ads are about you and your company. Good ads are about your customer and their happiness. Ads filled with “me, my, we,” and “our,” are about you and your company. Ads filled with the words “you” and “your” are about the customer and the happiness you want to bring them.

Q: Should every ad have a call to action?

A: No, because if they did, your ads would be predictable.

Q: Are you saying that NO ad should have a call to...