Wizard of Ads Clay Campbell

New Year Resolutions from a small business owner.

I’d like to share with you some insight and my goals for my own business this year. Some may work for you and your business, take what you can use; scrap the rest.

1. I will give Lagniappe to every customer at every opportunity. For those not privy to lagniappe, it is a Cajon term used in the south meaning “to give something extra, something unexpected, to someone for no reason other than you just wish to generous. I think of it as a way to say thanks to a customer. Perhaps that person would tell another person about it. In this manner good word of mouth advertising will be spread.

2. I will write better ads. For all media. I will have another person critique them that is a professional wordsmith. Someone that knows the meaning of “pithy”. I will use unexpected words that surprise the Broca area of the human brain so that my message might enter the mind of the consumer and not be “turned off”.

3. I will sit down and have myself a “don’t kid yourself day” and determine a good plan and strategy for this upcoming year for my business. I will then let all advertising be fueled and driven by my “Strategy”. I will not buy any short term “package” from any advertising source because it was a “good deal” at a bargain price. I’ll negotiate the best prices possible for a year at a time and spend only what my planned out budget says I can spend. When I spend money on a thing that’s not planned I have to take that money from something that is.

4. I will go to at least one advertising seminar, the best one I can afford, to help me plan better, advertise better, write better copy, to learn what works and what doesn’t and why. Because it is hard for me to read the label when I’m on the inside of the bottle. I will budget for this expense, plan for it, take time from my business to go, and go do it because many times my advertising is consumers first introduction to my business and I must make a favorable impression.

5. I will read a minimum of two books this year on advertising to stay abreast of new information and ideas. I never can tell where a good idea will come from that will make us better at making a first impression. I may only get one thing the book I can use.

6. The one idea Henry Ford found that made him one of the richest men in the world was implementing an assembly line. He got the idea from Business Topology. He went to a completely unrelated business, a meat packing plant, where each man would do a cut on the carcass, then the animal moved on to the next guy who made a cut. And on and on. It was a disassembly line. He got the idea because he was looking for an idea that would improve his business. I promise this year to not let the urgent take priority over the important. Here is a quote by Ole Ben Franklin from my book Escape From Mediocrity:
“Order: Let all your things have their place. Let each part of your business have its time.” (Have a game plan for your business and your life. Stop periodically and check your progress. I say never expect what you don’t inspect.) The remarks in quotation marks are mine not Ben’s.

7. I will budget for my advertising by setting aside 10% of my expected gross sales this year, multiplied by my mark-up, minus my rent. I will divide that by 12 and spend that each month as an investment in my business.

8. I will resist the urge to have instant gratification with my advertising. I will think like the tortoise and not the hare. I am in this for the long haul.

9. If my business has what it takes to succeed… then it will succeed regardless of my advertising. Good advertising will only accelerate and enlarge the success or failure that was going to happen anyway. Therefore I must be very careful to deliver on everything I promise in my ads.

10. I will make sure I am consistent in my advertising in:
My Quarterly Newsletters to my data base, keep my website updated, keep trying to make my blog better, in my flyers, and billboards. I will add up all my experience and invest it into the New Year! My goal with all my advertising is to have people think of my business first, and feel the best about doing business with my company.

Merry Christmas

Barbie and I had what I think was a most beautiful Christmas Eve. Our children are healthy and were all home, Barbie’s Dad was here, we played a board game as is our family tradition and we had a wonderful meal and opened gifts. I can’t describe how I feel inside except to say sometimes I know in my heart God’s hand is on my life and HE seems to be saying “Bless you my child.”

I am excited to tell you that I got what I wanted for Christmas: That is the release of my newest book from Wizard Press Escape From Mediocrity: Advice on Living the Above Average Life. It came out Friday! To take a look, go to

wizardofads.com

As we celebrate Christ’s birth today Dec 25th 2005, may the joy of the gift of God’s Son be with not just today but everyday.

Clay Campbell

Monday Morning Memo 12-19-06

Four Kinds of Ads

Great ads can be either product-specific or store-specific. Bad ads are generally category-specific. And then there are franchise ads.

Franchise ads build the master brand. The hope of every franchisee is that the ads provided by the franchisor will generate enough brand magnetism to pull customers into their store. Due to the fact that a franchisor can afford to create a higher quality ad campaign than the typical local merchant, this strategy often succeeds.

Category-specific ads are written broadly enough to fit every advertiser in a category. A transparent fabric of smoothly woven clichés, a category-specific ad is a generalized template into which one merely inserts a store name and address. "All you have to do is fill in the blanks." But remember: Ads that fit everyone don't work very well for anyone. These were once called institutional ads. I do not recommend them.

Product-specific ads benefit every retailer who sells the product, but they aren't really about the retailer at all. They're about the product. This is why the independent retailer should question whether or not to take the manufacturer's fifty cents to run their product-specific ads. Are they really paying for half of your advertising, or are you paying for half of theirs? Only when the co-op requirements are extremely flexible do I recommend that independent retailers accept the so-called "free money" offered by manufacturers. If you're paying half the cost, be sure at least half the message is about you.

Store-specific ads are the foundation of local branding, but to write them requires intimate, detailed research on the part of an expert ad writer. Rarely will a good, store-specific ad fit another advertiser in the same category. The story I'm about to tell you is true. I've changed only the name of the store, the town, and the vegetable:

Heisenberg's Jewelers had been in the same building on Main Street in Cabbage Valley for 105 years. A facelift 7 years earlier had given the store white carpet, walnut paneling and a huge chandelier in a high, domed ceiling. Heisenberg's was the Sistine Chapel of jewelry stores. Not a problem, except that Cabbage Valley is the turnip capital of the world, a little farming community of about 45,000 people. Even the wealthiest of Cabbage Valley's farmers felt they weren't dressed well enough to enter that store. Heisenberg's was truly an intimidating place.

"You need to understand who our customer is," my client told me as soon as I arrived. "Our customer is a 40 year-old woman with money. Upscale. Very upscale. Well dressed. Always buys the best. That's our customer. That's who you need to target." This was in mid-October. I had been hired by Heisenberg's to help save Christmas because if they had another season as bad as the previous six, they were going to have to close their doors in January.

"Let's get something straight," I told them. "There's no handle I can crank that will spit out 40 year-old rich women. I'm going to have to write ads that appeal to men or you're going to have to find another way to make a living." It's statements like those that separate consultants from salesmen.

This is the radio ad that saved Heisenberg's:

"Ladies, many of you will be fortunate enough this Christmas to find a small, but beautifully wrapped package under your tree bearing a simple gold seal that says ‘Heisenberg's.' Now you and I both know there's jewelry in the box. But the man who put it there for you is trying desperately to tell you that you are more precious than diamonds, more valuable than gold, and very, very special. You see, he could have gone to a department store and bought department store jewelry, or picked up something at the mall like all the other husbands. But the men who come to Heisenberg's aren't trying to get off cheap or easy. Men who come to Heisenberg's believe their wives deserve the best. And whether they spend 99 dollars or 99 hundred, the message is the same: Men who come to Heisenberg's are still very much in love... We just thought you should know."

That ad was delivered slowly and thoughtfully with style and grace. No hurry. No street address. No store hours. No phone number. We simply told listeners what they already knew about Heisenberg's but made them feel differently about it. What we said in essence was, "If your husband voluntarily came to this scarily expensive store, he must really be in love with you." It worked like magic.

Throughout the month of December, men wedged themselves into Heisenberg's, waved stacks of cash at the register and shouted, "I don't care what you put in the box, but make sure it's got that damn gold sticker." Heisenberg's made a blistering fortune that year and reversed their downward trend.

Thirteen months later I got a phone call from a jeweler in Connecticut. "You the man they call the Wizard of Ads?"

"Who is this?" I asked.

"I ran one of them ‘wizard' radio ads that's supposed to work. Had the worst Christmas I ever had. Didn't work at all. Terrible. What've you got to say for yourself?"

A few probing questions revealed that my client in Cabbage Valley had given this fellow a copy of my "simple gold seal" ad as though it were some kind of miracle cure.

"I have to disagree with you," I told the man. "That ad didn't fail. It worked extremely well for whoever is the scary expensive jeweler in your town. He had a tremendous Christmas. And he has you to thank for it. The people in your town just knew that your store wasn't the one described in the ad."

Like every great store-specific ad, the Heisenberg's gold seal campaign would never have worked if Heisenberg's hadn't already had the reputation of being extremely intimidating and expensive. That same ad could just as easily have been delivered by newspaper, direct mail or television and it would have worked just as well. It was the message - not the media - that delivered our miracle.

Franchise ads are for team players who want to help build a strong collective brand.
Product-specific ads are for special promotions.
Store-specific ads are for local branding.
Category-specific "institutional" ads are a waste of money.

What kind of ads are you running?

Roy H. Williams

LAST WEEK'S MEMO, Hi-Def Imagination, gave you one tiny tool for getting outside the box. How would you like to have a whole toolbox for creative thinking, with each tool more powerful than the one before? Be in Austin January 12 for Systematic Idea Generation with Mark Fox, chief engineer of the Space Shuttle. The class is a mind-blower. I've taken it twice. – RHW

ANOTHER CHRISTMAS GIFT: Wizard Academy After Dark is a free music download unlike anything you've ever heard. Check it out.

AND NOW FOR THE GRAND FINALE – Three lucky business owners are each going to receive a full tuition scholarship to the Wizard's rarely-taught Secret Formulas Advertising Workshop to be held January 25-27. Six of the Wizard's partners will be in attendance, each with a carefully selected business client. Three full-tuition scholarships will be granted to the world's three luckiest business owners, and three seats will be sold, creating a total of twelve business owners in attendance.

Wit and Wisdom from my friend Walt Kosnitchzki

(You can find GREAT articles; new ones every week at "my friends sites". Located on the left side of this page.)

Walt sez...
It's Content Not Delivery
Radio is near and dear to my heart. Not the radio industry but those faraway radio stations I fell asleep listening to as a teenager. Not the radio industry but the radio stations I worked for thirty plus years before I struck out on my own. I love radio that is why it breaks my heart to watch the radio industry’s battle with satellite radio.

I had the opportunity to listen to samples from the new campaign the National Association of Broadcasters is about to roll out. “Radio, you shouldn’t have to pay for it.” I shouldn’t have to pay over two dollars for gasoline either but that another story.

In one ad, a pay telephone operator interrupts the play-by-play of a baseball game requesting “twenty-five cents for the next three minutes.” “Radio, you shouldn’t have to pay for it.”

There’s a lesson for all of us here. The radio industry is not a brand. Radio is not a brand. Radio is a content delivery vehicle as are the iPod, XM, Sirius, the Internet, cell phones, etc. Individual radio stations are brands but not the industry. But for the sake of discussion I’ll grant that you shouldn’t have to pay for radio even though I pay for my cell phone, my high speed Internet connection and my cable every month.

What about paying for content? That’s a different story. I grew up in Detroit following the Tigers. With XM Satellite I can still follow “my team” all season long. I can’t hear the Tigers in Milwaukee very often, so that content might be worth a few bucks a month.

I listen to WCPE, a listener supported station in Raleigh Durham, North Carolina over the Internet every day. It’s worth a donation of a few bucks a month to support their operations because I like their announcers and the brand of Classical Music they play.

Should I have to pay to shop? Membership stores such as Sam’s Club, Costco and Bi-Mart are sprouting up all over the country. They represent a small percentage of retail sales, just as XM and Sirius represent a small percentage of radio listening. But if we follow the radio industry’s lead, retailers should start using the tagline “Shopping, you shouldn’t have to pay for it.”

Makes about as much sense.

Listen to the NAB ads:

http://www.nab.org/newsroom/issues/radio/radiomarketingcampaignspots-talk.asp

December 01, 2005 in Advertising, Radio | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Big Turkeys
The scene opens in a dimly lit kitchen. Gobble gobble gobble. The rancher puts on a jacket, walks out of his ramshackle house, nods to a T-Rex sized Turkey and leads him back to the corral. “Get ready for a big Thanksgiving” “Sears.”

What the heck?

Cute, clever, funny and different ads that say absolutely nothing are (in my humble opinion) a big waste of advertising dollars. What exactly does Sears have to do with a big Thanksgiving? Now a 30-foot turkey would feed a fairly large (figuratively speaking) family. But as far as I can tell you can’t buy a giant turkey at Sears.

K-Mart ran Thanksgiving ads as well (I think they used regular sized turkeys) but they were promoting the fact that K-Mart was open on Thanksgiving Day. That makes sense (the ad does even if being open doesn’t). I understood what they wanted me to do. I didn’t go – but it was a comfort knowing that somewhere a blue light was flashing just for me.

What do you want me to do or feel when I see or hear your ad? You can try to persuade me to take an action (shop on Thanksgiving) or help deepen your brand in my subconscious (make me feel good about your business). A big turkey dropping feathers in a dusty yard doesn’t achieve either. Perhaps the next campaign could feature a Santa so large he can’t come down the chimney. “Get Ready For A Big Christmas.” Makes about as much sense.

Are giant turkeys running around in your ads? Or are you giving your listener/viewer/reader some meat to savor?

Bon Appetite