Open your ads with a big, emotional idea. Save the details for your web page. Use parallel structure if you can. Parallel structure is a writing technique that uses similar grammatical constructions to express related ideas. Patterns of words, phrases, or clauses that are repeated show that your selected ideas are of equal importance. Parallel structure uses clarity and rhythm in writing to create a balanced and harmonious flow. It is how you can sing to the heart without music. Parallel structu...
Aug 18, 2025•5 min
Pearl had the power of 5 different breeds. She was my Megadog. The Mustang was a 1971 convertible, white with a blue interior. The car and the dog could not talk, of course, but speech is not required to show love. Pearl and I found each other in the middle of nowhere, Oklahoma, when I was 8 years old. She had been abandoned by the side of the road and was starving. I was lonely and needed a friend. When Pearl realized that she had been adopted, she became as mellow and contented as a dope-smoki...
Aug 11, 2025•7 min
“More agile than a turtle! Stronger than a mouse! Nobler than a head of lettuce! His shield is his Heart! It’s… El CHAPULIN COLORADO!” El Chapulín Colorado – The Red Grasshopper – was a Spanish-speaking television star loved by hundreds of millions of people around the world. The Red Grasshopper would shout “¡Síganme los buenos!” and leap into action whenever a ghost, a bandit, or any other threat appeared. (“¡Síganme los buenos!” translates to “Follow me, the good ones,” or “Good guys, follow m...
Aug 04, 2025•7 min
A troubling statement makes us want to think of exceptions to it that would prove that statement to be wrong. “Outliers are interesting, but they rarely matter,” is a troubling statement, and you may already be thinking of exceptions to it. But it remains true nonetheless. This second statement is also true. “If there were no outliers, there would be no new inventions, no innovations, no progress. We would be trapped forever in the status quo.” These seemingly contradictory statements can both b...
Jul 28, 2025•8 min
Clarity and Brevity are the highest creativity. But “clear and brief” does not mean simple and predictable. One the most talented writers of advertising in the world would be surprised to hear me call him that. Jonathan Edward Durham is a novelist. He recently posted this random thought. “‘Why am I so sad today?’ I ask myself after staring at my little handheld sadness machine and clicking all the sad little things that will definitely make me sad.” You may not agree with Durham’s statement, but...
Jul 21, 2025•5 min
January 18, 1604: King James, a Protestant, announces that he will commission an English translation of the Bible. January 16, 1605: Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote is published in Spain. It is considered to be the first modern novel. Every sophisticated storytelling device used by the best writers today made its initial debut in Don Quixote. February 28, 1605: A 41-year-old Italian named Galileo publishes an astronomical text written as an imagined conversation. A pair of Paduan peasants talk ...
Jul 14, 2025•6 min
I was whining to Clay Cary about the interest rate the bank was going to charge me to fund a real estate investment. I felt the percentage was way too high. Clay asked, “Is the deal you’re about to make a good deal? How much money will you make from it?” I answered his question conservatively. He said, “Now let’s calculate the total amount of interest that you will pay on the loan that makes this deal possible.” We calculated the dollar amounts. I was going to make hundreds of times more money o...
Jul 07, 2025•5 min
Pain is a signal that something is wrong. Pain whispers, shouts, and screams, “Pay attention. Be careful. Something is wrong.” Jean Marzollo wrote a children’s poem in 1948 that romanticized Christopher Columbus. It inspired a generation of children during the Captain Kangaroo years. Her proud poem begins, “In fourteen hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue” Bill Bryson wrote an insightful summary of that famous voyage on page 205 of his book, “At Home.” “Columbus’s real achievement w...
Jun 30, 2025•7 min
You want to succeed. But will you recognize success when it happens? What will be its indicators? How will you measure it? Most importantly, how long are you willing to pursue it? You probably overestimate what you can accomplish in a year, and underestimate what you can accomplish in ten years. How many years have you been pursuing your dream? Experience is the name you are allowed give to your mistakes, but only if you have learned from them. Some people have ten years of experience. Most peop...
Jun 23, 2025•7 min
The Muses of Greek mythology were nine goddesses associated with the arts, sciences, and memory. They were the source of inspiration for artists, thinkers, poets, dancers, musicians, and philosophers. They were the goddesses of knowledge, embodying the wisdom and creative power found in poetry, songs, and myths. This is the point: a muse is never an actual woman. When a man chooses a flesh-and-blood woman to be his muse, she becomes the symbol of something deeper, wiser, and much more mysterious...
Jun 16, 2025•5 min
The Muses of Greek mythology were nine goddesses associated with the arts, sciences, and memory. They were the source of inspiration for artists, thinkers, poets, dancers, musicians, and philosophers. They were the goddesses of knowledge, embodying the wisdom and creative power found in poetry, songs, and myths. This is the point: a muse is never an actual woman. When a man chooses a flesh-and-blood woman to be his muse, she becomes the symbol of something deeper, wiser, and much more mysterious...
Jun 13, 2025•5 min
The greatest companies are the ones with the happiest customers. To create happy customers, you need to be customer-centric. Every company believes they are customer-centric. But while a great company keeps the happiness of their customer in the center of their thoughts, the average company puts their customer in the center of the cross-hairs of a rifle scope. Great companies ask, “How can we give our customers the buying experience that they would prefer?” They work at removing the friction fro...
Jun 09, 2025•7 min
The strongest brands are the ones with the most distinctive personalities. But even a weak and faded personality is better than none at all. A brand with a personality is an imaginary character in the minds of the customers of that brand. It is similar to the characters in syndicated television shows, bestselling novels, and big movie franchises. Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, and Robin Williams are actors, but they are also characters in your mind. Willie Nelson, Michael Jackson, and Taylor Swift...
Jun 02, 2025•16 min
“Around the swimming beagles, bright stars danced on rippling waters like a thousand little fishes of light scurrying in a sea of darkness. Can there be a more beautiful sight than when sky meets ocean in the black of night?” The lawyer whispered to himself, the beagles, and the sea as the soft blanket of summer wrapped them all in her warm embrace. Night is a time of reflection. Not of stars in water only, but of times past and times to come. And such a night was this.” – Beagles of Destinae, c...
May 26, 2025•6 min
Pennie and I had a difficult week a long way from home. It began with a piece of gravel that cracked her windshield. Looking back, we should have just lived with it. But we didn’t know that at the time. We dropped her car off at the appointed time on the appointed day. When Pennie picked it up, the upper-left corner of her new windshield whistled loudly at speeds above 30mph. She called the windshield people. They gave her a new appointment. When we picked it up for the second time, the whistle ...
May 19, 2025•7 min
“If people were paid according to how hard they work, the richest people on earth would be the ones digging ditches with a shovel in the hot summertime.” That’s what my mother told me when I was a boy. When she saw the puzzled look on my face, she continued. “People who make a lot of money are paid according to the weight of the responsibility they carry and the quality of the decisions they make.” Second only to grief, the weight of responsibility is the heaviest burden that a person can carry....
May 12, 2025•6 min
His name was Rab. He died in Bengal, the land of tigers, in 1941. On his way out the door, he said, “Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.” When Rab was sixteen, he published a book of poetry under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha , which means “Sun Lion.” Those poems were seized upon by literary authorities as “long-lost classics.” Where do you hurry with your basket this late evening when the marketing is over? They all have come home with their burdens; The moon peeps fr...
May 05, 2025•5 min
Michael Dell and Shaquille O’Neal planned their work and worked their plans. Dell understood the formulas, and followed the rules, of efficiency. O’Neal understood the formulas and followed the rules of basketball. Each of them faithfully followed a Structural plan. Michael Dell invented nothing, improvised nothing, and innovated only once. But that single innovation made him a billionaire. Dell’s innovation was to bring tested, reliable, proven methods of cost-cutting to the manufacturing and d...
Apr 28, 2025•8 min
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” “Life… Liberty… and the pursuit of Happiness.” We published those words 229 years ago when we declared our independence from Britain. That document was the earliest expression of what has come to be known as the American dream. Jefferson’s Declaration did not free us from the tyranny of ...
Apr 21, 2025•5 min
“If we train our children only to harvest, who will plant the seed?” I wrote those words after contemplating the short-sightedness of so-called, “performance marketing,” on March 11, 2010. “Performance marketing” is the new name for direct response advertising. It works best when it extracts the value from a well-known brand. Its objective is to bring in a lot of money quickly. That is why business owners are attracted to it. But here’s the caveat: value cannot be extracted from a brand unless i...
Apr 14, 2025•5 min
I was watching a few of Evan Puschak’s “Nerdwriter” videos when I heard my own inner voice composing a thank you note to him. In the quiet of my mind, I told Evan that I have always found his analysis of literature, movies, music, photographs, and paintings to be incisive and insightful. Incisive Insightful Those two words, back-to-back, hit me so hard that I stumbled and fell backward into a bottomless chasm of grief over the loss of Andrew Cross. Evan Puschak is incisive. Andrew Cross was insi...
Apr 07, 2025•7 min
Magical Thinking is often misunderstood. Jason Segel plays a psychologist in the Apple + TV show, “Shrinking.” He is talking to a patient with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. He looks at her. “This again?” She is holding her breath. He says, “You looked at the clock and now you have to hold your breath until the minute changes?” Holding her breath, she nods her head. He says, “Look, I know you feel like this compulsion is gonna help keep bad things from happening, but that’s called magical thinki...
Mar 31, 2025•5 min
Brian Brushwood knows how to gain and hold attention in social media. Reaching for that brass ring causes most people to lean too far off their plastic horse on the social media merry-go-round. SPLAT! They land flat on their faces with only a few hundred views. Brian has built a YouTube channel to 1.7 million subscribers, an entirely different channel to more than 2 million subscribers, and 12 days ago he produced a 1-minute “short” that had 3.6 million views on the first day, and at the time of...
Mar 24, 2025•6 min
“Features and benefits” were once the most loudly shouted secrets of customer acquisition in Business to Consumer advertising (B2C). I even wrote a chapter in my first book – The Wizard of Ads – on the use of “which means” as a word-bridge between: 1. naming a feature of your product and 2. naming the benefit it delivers to your customer. But that was 27 years ago. When “features and benefits” became predictable in B2C advertising, they quickly tumbled into the gutters of “Ad-speak” and lost all...
Mar 17, 2025•7 min
Philip Dusenberry once said, “I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes.” I can testify that Dusenberry is correct. The best ad writers make more money than the most highly paid lawyers and heart surgeons. Great advertising makes an enormous difference in the top line revenue of a company. A reputation for being able to write great ads makes an enormous difference in your bank account. But only if you g...
Mar 10, 2025•7 min
Twenty-four thousand men were crowded into Knockaloe Interment Camp in 1914 because they had been found guilty of being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong last name. Tightly confined behind barbed wire, those men grew increasingly weak, feeble, stiff and awkward until a man named Joseph was shoved through their gate on September 12, 1915. He gave his fellow prisoners strength, stamina, flexibility and grace. They never forgot him. When the war was over and those men were relea...
Mar 03, 2025•5 min
The biggest decisions I ever made didn’t seem big at the time. I’ll bet the same is true for you. Pivotal changes in direction seem obvious to us 10 years later, but during that tiny moment when we alter our course a little, it feels like a very small thing. Here are 4 small, pivotal moments that loom large in my mind today. Moment #1: I was a 22-year-old advertising salesman who was rapidly going bald. Every business owner I met was trying to decide, “Where should I invest my ad budget?” One mo...
Feb 24, 2025•10 min
If you believe that people today have a short attention span, you are mistaken. FACT: We live in an over-communicated society. This is why we have learned how to quickly filter out messages that do not interest us. FACT: We will happily spend several hours binge-watching shows that appeal to us. Where’s your theory about a short attention span now? If you want to get people’s attention and hold that attention, talk to them about things they already care about. If people aren’t paying attention t...
Feb 17, 2025•6 min
Buying advertising is a lot like buying diamonds. Allow me to explain. Anyone who talks to a jeweler will be told that diamonds are graded according to the 4 C’s: Color, Clarity, Carat weight, and Cut. Customers ask the jeweler, “Which of the 4 Cs is most important?” This seems like a perfectly reasonable question, but the truth is that the 4 C’s cannot be compared to one another. There is no rubric, no metric, no algorithm that can equate them. The 4 C’s are distinctly separate from one another...
Feb 10, 2025•12 min
I recently sent you two memos about our need for positive hope. “Hollywood’s Broken Angel” was the true story of a woman who desperately needed a friend to encourage her. “Hope and a Future” explained how easy it is to recharge the emotional batteries of a friend whose light has dimmed. Positive hope crackles with the vibrant energy of life itself. It radiates honesty, openness, forgiveness, acceptance, optimism, loyalty and love. Positive hope illuminates the heart and drives away the darkness....
Feb 03, 2025•5 min
