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...

Billy Sunday was born in 1862, the second year of America’s Civil War. He died in 1935, during the Great Depression. Billy was a wildly flamboyant and controversial preacher, but he made an interesting observation:

“More men fail through lack of purpose than lack of talent.”

We’ll talk more about purpose in just a minute, but first we need to talk about possibilities.

I will say it plainly:

1. What you see in the mirror isn’t you.
2. Look inside yourself and take inventory of what you find there.
3. Realize that this is all you have to work with.
4. Make the best of it.

I will say it as Confucius might have said it:

1. Gilded paper and bright ribbons adorn an empty vessel while gold hides in a rough wooden box.
2. You will not find what is not there. But what lies inside you is easy to see.
3. Everything within you is all that you have.
4. Therefore, it must be enough.

I will say it like an old warrior:

1. Fancy uniforms don’t win battles.
2. It’s not the size of the dog in the fight that matters, it’s the size of fight in the dog.
3. If you don’t have it in you, it doesn’t exist.
4. Learn to use what you’ve got.

This is how Yoda would have said it:

1. Be invisible, you will.
2. Inside yourself, you must look.
3. Hmm. Flaws, you shall find.
4. Magic, these are.

I will say it as someone who loves you:

1. You are the perfect you.
2. No one else can be you as well as you can.
3. You will be you for the rest of your life.
4. It is time to discover what you can do.

And now it is time to talk about purpose again.

A sad voice inside you whispers: “Everyone talks about purpose, but no one can tell me what it is, or where to find it.”

Quit listening to that whiner. Purpose is given to you by what you care about. Is there anything you care about?

Of course there is.

Are you ready for the real mind-blower?

Purpose is given to you by everything you care about. You are overflowing with purpose. The problem is that you care about so many things that you are having a hard time choosing a purpose.

Here is the good and happy news: You can have more than one purpose!

In fact, you already do; and you have what it takes to make a difference.

How many differences do you want to make?

Pick two or three of them to get started. You can add other ones later, when you have taken these first ones as far as you choose to go. Sooner or later, you’ll choose a few that will sink deep roots in you.

Every oak tree begins as an acorn.

Now go. Get started.

Roy H. Williams

PS – “It is better to burn the candle at both ends, and in the middle, too, than to put it away in the closet and let the mice eat it.” – Henry van Dyke

David Sauers used to be a commercial banker, but today he runs a service business with 50 branches nationwide. It’s not the type of business that most people dream about owning. The nature of his business – and the powerful lessons you can learn from his success – will be revealed in this week’s story. But here’s an interesting twist: In a private note to Roy, roving reporter Rotbart wrote, “I love unusual guests and David Sauers definitely fits the bill.” The roving reporter is at it again! MondayMorningRadio.com

One hundred and two years ago, Benito organized a March on Rome with the intention of forcing the king of Italy to yield the government to him. It worked, and Benito was appointed prime minister.

Thirty-two-year-old Antonio had a problem with that, and spoke out against Benito.

Benito got tired of Antonio’s criticism and had him thrown into prison, where he died 11 years later.

But while he was still with us, he wrote 30 notebooks containing more than 3,000 pages of history and analysis. The prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci are considered by historians to be highly original contributions to 20th-century political theory.

Wizard Academy vice-chancellor Dave Young brought Antonio to my attention last week when he forwarded to me a glistening quote written by this shackled young writer:

“The old world is dying. And the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

Those words of Antonio Gramsci dance and sting like honeybees, don’t they?

In return for his gift of Antonio Gramsci, I sent Dave a couple of the enthusiastic ramblings of American scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson:

“I will defend AD and BC, year of the Lord, AD, ‘Ano Domini,’ and BC, ‘Before Christ.’ I’ll defend the use of those because a lot of hard work went into creating that calendar – the Gregorian calendar – which is now used worldwide. It’s based on a Christian construct, but it had a lot of very interesting science that went in behind it.

I’m not just going to ‘swap out’ the words to dereligify it. I don’t mind leaving credit where it’s due.

I don’t know any atheist that still uses AD and BC. They use ‘Common Era,’ CE, and BCE, ‘Before Common Era.’

But who are they fooling? It’s the same numbers of years. They’re just trying to ‘paint over’ a religious reference.

I don’t have that much objection to the religious participation in civilization.”

But this next comment of Neil deGrasse Tyson serves as a sort of counterbalance to that first one:

“Ben Franklin was the world’s most famous scientist in his day. But he’s not remembered in America as that; he’s remembered as a founding father.

He invented the lightning rod.

What’s the tallest structure back then? The steeple makes the church the tallest structure in any city. What is the most susceptible to a lightning strike? The tallest structure. So lightning was taking out churches left and right, and if you were the other church that wasn’t taken out, you had good argument for saying the people in the church that burned down were worshiping in the wrong way.

Ben Franklin then invents the lightning rod, which does two things: It dissipates charges that build up under your structure that would otherwise be part of the lightning strike, and it sends them back into the air without the benefit of lightning. So that makes you less susceptible to begin with. And if the lightning strikes it, then it directs all of the charge through the metal and not through your house.

So Ben Franklin does this, and churches are no longer destroyed by lightning, even if they’re hit, and he’s accused of heresy for thwarting the will of God.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson is famous for his atheism but he vigorously defends the use of the Christian system of dating the history of the world in years that count backward and forward from the day that Jesus was born.

Benjamin Franklin doubted the divinity of Jesus, but he invented the lightning rod to make sure that churches did not burn down. And they accused him of heresy for it.*

As I consider articulate Antonio and bumbling Benito of Italy, I recall the words of a delightful American writer who was born in the same year Antonio was born. When she was accused of being too critical, the delightful Dorothy Parker responded:

“How could I possibly overthrow the government when I can’t even keep my dog down?”

Me...