Wizard of Ads Clay Campbell

Gen X'ers... Great Story!

Thought you all would enjoy reading this Gen-X story from the Detroit News.

http://www.detnews.com/2005/editorial/0508/14/A15-279825.htm

Trip to Austin

I just returned from three days at the Wizard Academy in Austin Texas. A mind altering three days.
I worked on internalizing into my brain and mastering the techniques
of:
Story Uncovery, Business Topology, Surprising Broca, Frosting and Suessing, Being Monet, Being Robert Frank, and Practical Applications of Chaos Theory including the use of Third Gravitating Bodies.
I did graduate. I have my diploma; but I feel like I only grasped a morsel of the smorgasbord that was offered.
The teacher Roy H. Williams asked why each student came. (The tuition is $3500 plus airfare and hotel) My reply was “I am a learner and I was curious.” I want to become a better writer and communicator. I took copious note and I came back with what I went for.

While there, as a class project, I wrote this poem. I’d like to share it with you.

Look for the Good
By Clay Campbell

A mundane lifestyle others lead
Being average is not for me.
I’m losing the mornings of regret,
And going to a job I detest.
I did bland work there.
I had no telescope eyes to let me see
Where I could be.

Some jumped to their death from the Twin Towers;
Praying to their “Higher Powers”
I’d rather choose that fate
Than return to the old life I hate.
I begin with a new me,
anticipating what is to be.
I plan my day and make my list,
prior days it seems I’d missed,
I can’t feign curiosity,
To see the way things used to be
That relentless habit I had:
I overlooked the good in life
And could only see the bad.
August 18th 2005

On some future posts I’ll share a two minute short story I wrote while there in Texas and also a sixty second commercial for restaurant/dance club in Austin called: Hooked on a Feeling.

My new book, Escape From Mediocrity: Advice on Living The Above Average Life, will be out in about a month Wizard Press tells me.

Clay

Getting What You Want

Clay Sez,
Do you want more business for your small business? Have you been asking for it in the right way? Using the RIGHT WORDS? The following is a recent MMM from Roy H. Williams about getting what you want.

Getting What You Want

One of these days I'm going to calculate the odds of pulling away from a drive-thru window and actually finding what was ordered in the bag.

For 3 years I've been calculating the odds of getting extra lemon for your tea when you add the phrase "lots of lemon, please" in America's better restaurants. Currently, this request will get you some small quantity of extra lemon 47.4 percent of the time; usually a single, sad slice alongside the sliver you were going to get anyway.

If you really want "lots of lemon," you must raise the impact quotient of your message; paint a bigger picture in the mind. Smile and say, "I'd like iced tea with so many lemons that they slide off the table onto the floor. I'm talking about this restaurant being knee-deep in lemons when I leave, so many lemons that it takes two men and a little boy to carry them all. Will you do that for me?"

Do I get lots of lemon when I say this? Yes. Do I enjoy doing it? No. Do I think it's witty, cute, clever, funny? No.

I do it because I want the lemons.

What do you want? And how have you been asking for it?

Do you typically assume ....

Do you typically assume that people are paying attention when you speak? E. M. Cioran said, "If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot." I fear he was probably right.

The key to being understood is to raise the impact quotient of your message.

Have you figured out yet that we're talking about advertising? And sermons? And classroom lectures? And effective web copy? And blockbuster screenplays? And Pulitzer prize winning journalism?

The higher the impact quotient of your message, the less repetition is required to enter into declarative memory. The higher the impact quotient, the bigger the scene painted on the visuospatial sketchpad of working memory in the dorsolateral prefrontal association area of the brain.

Wizard Academy is a school of the communication arts. We study all the languages of the mind, including shape, color, position, ratio, pitch, key, tempo, contour, musical interval, rhythm and architecture. But words have been the highest form of communication since Genesis chapter one, when God spoke a universe into existence and then created us in his image.

Learn to harness the power of words. Can you name anything else that will make as big a difference in your life?

Roy H. Williams

PS - Learn to make your website sing from Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg, the Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti of online marketing. Their latest book, Call to Action, instantly became a New York Times bestseller when it was released a few weeks ago. But nothing is as good as hearing them explain their revolutionary concepts live and in person. Treat yourself to 2 days of learning from the best, Sept. 8-9 at Tuscan Hall on the new campus of Wizard Academy. Online marketing doesn't have to be a disappointment.

PPS - Sept 21-22 is the next Blue Moon. for Ad Writing 101 - Live.