“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 of their effectiveness.

Naming features and benefits is still the right thing to do in Business to Business advertising (B2B) and in Direct Response ads. In those environments, your customers already know they are in the cross hairs of a sales pitch. So name a feature, followed by “which means,” and then tell them about the benefit they will experience.

Here’s how that Direct Response ad might sound:

“TwinkleWhite toothpaste contains Polychromaticite® which means your teeth will be whiter, your breath will be fresher, and everyone will be attracted to you. TwinkleWhite toothpaste is the choice of 93% of billionaires and 97% of supermodels worldwide, which means Polychromaticite® is an essential ingredient in the creation of personal wealth and beauty. This miracle toothpaste isn’t sold in stores, which means you will save 65 percent when your order TwinkleWhite directly from the laboratory at TwinkleWhite.com”

Direct Response advertising is a unique monster who lives and dies by its own special rules.

1. It is judged by its ability to generate an immediate result.

2. It offers no continuing benefit to the advertiser.

Direct Response is the preferred method of advertising for people who are selling a stand-alone product, tickets to an event, or a quick solution for a short-term problem, such as roof repair after a hurricane. None of these people is building a brand.

Although ads for B2C sales activation can sound similar to B2B ads and Direct Response ads like the one above, different rules apply.

I will now whisper to you the quiet secrets of B2C sales activation in 2025.

1. Every Powerful Message Comes at a Cost. Vulnerability is the currency that buys trust in today’s over-communicated world. Financial vulnerability, emotional vulnerability, and relational vulnerability demonstrate your sincerity.
2. When you don’t have cash, spend time instead. Brad Casebier owned a tiny plumbing company in a town that doesn’t have enough water. So he calculated how much water a running toilet wastes every day, then advertised that he would install a new toilet flapper for free in every home that had a running toilet. No strings attached. Brad became a superstar and his company became huge. Interestingly, the average person who needed a new toilet flapper spent about $800 on other things they needed done.
3. These diamond earrings whisper, “I love you.” Customer interest skyrockets when inanimate objects have thoughts, feelings, or the ability to speak.
4. Promote your slowest day of the week. I rarely visit my favorite restaurant on Mondays because it is always too crowded. Their offer of “Buy a Burger and Get One Free” packs the house with people who buy lots of appetizers, side dishes, desserts, and drinks from the bar because they saved a couple of bucks on a burger. The offer is for dine-in only.
5. Don’t think like a business owner. Think like the customer. Do not try to unload your buying mistakes through sales activation.

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 get paid according to the growth of the businesses you write for.

Did you notice that I ended that sentence with a preposition? A pedantic will tell you that I should have said, “But only if you get paid according to the growth of the businesses for whom you write ads.” But I chose not to do that. If you can tell me why, you might have the makings of an ad writer.

Do you have a friend who reads the books of the world’s most famous authors?

If you say, “Call me Ishmael,” and your friend says, “Moby Dick,” your friend has the ingredients to bake a wordcake.

Say to your friend, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.”

If your friend says, “Robert Frost,” he or she has the ability to lead people to places they have never been.

Say, “The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.”

If your friend looks at you and says, “Tom Robbins died last month,” they definitely have the makings of ad writer.

“As you read, so will you write.”

If the cadence and rhythm and unpredictable phrases singular to poets, screenwriters and novelists are echoing in your brain, your mind will spew rainbows of words like ocean water from the blowhole of a whale.

Luke records Jesus as having said, “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.” If you want to know what is inside a person, listen to what they say and read what they write.

The minds of great writers are filled with the music of other great writers. Music cannot flow from your fingertips if it does not live in your mind.

I don’t mean to be unkind, but most writers have no music in their mind.

Tom Robbins told NPR in 2014, “I would tell stories aloud to himself, but always out in the yard with a stick in my hand. I would beat the ground as I told the story. And we moved fairly frequently. We would leave houses behind where one section of the yard was completely bare from where I had destroyed the grass. But I realized much later in life that what I was doing was drumming. I was building a rhythm. Even today as a writer I pay a lot of attention to the rhythm in my work.”

When Tom Robbins died, hypnotic passages from his bestselling novels were quoted by NPR and The New York Times in their eulogies of his life.

Character dialogue written by Aaron Sorkin is the standard by which all screenwriting is judged. Aaron says, “It’s not just that dialogue sounds like music to me. It actually is music. Anytime someone is speaking for the purpose of performance, whether they’re doing it from a pulpit in a church, whether it’s a candidate on the stump or an actor on a stage, anytime they’re speaking for the purposes of performance, all the rules of music apply.”

The workload of my 81 Wizard of Ads partners will soon be at maximum capacity.

I am looking for brilliant ad writers. Between now and the end of the year I will onboard a small group of writers who are worth a lot more money than they are currently being paid. They will attend the partner meeting this autumn.

Selection, orientation, and enculturation requires diligence and patience on both sides.

Our journey will begin when you send exactly 12

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 released, Joseph boarded a ship for America. While onboard that ship, he fell in love with a woman named Clara who was also headed to America. When they arrived in New York, Joseph and Clara opened a studio on 8th street that would send ripples across the world.

The rest of this story is about how those ripples became a wave.

George Balanchine sent his ballet dancers to Joseph on 8th street to gain strength, stamina, flexibility and grace.

Martha Graham sent her modern dancers to Joseph on 8th street to gain strength, stamina, flexibility and grace.

The best dancers on Broadway went to Joseph on 8th Street to gain strength, stamina, flexibility and grace.

George Balanchine became known as “The Father of Modern Ballet.”

Martha Graham is shown in Apple’s famous “Think Different” video as one of the 17 people that Steve Jobs felt had changed the world.

Broadway, Ballet, and Modern Dance were lifted to new heights.

When those ripples from 8th Street reached California, the “Golden Age of Hollywood” began.

Gene Kelley danced with a light post and sang in the rain to the thundering applause of America.

Slim, elegant, and incredibly strong, Fred Astaire did impossible things effortlessly.

Ginger Rodgers did exactly what Fred did, but backwards and in high heels.

A young man was known for his slogan, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” He brought strength, stamina, flexibility and grace to the world of boxing.

Like Martha Graham, this young boxer was chosen to appear in Apple’s famous “Think Different” video as one of the 17 “crazy ones” who changed the world.

He had been the heavyweight champion of the world for 5 years when a 10-year-old boy named Michael elevated dancing to an even higher place with the help of his 4 older brothers. Those 8th Street ripples of strength, stamina, flexibility and grace had splashed back from the California coast and were now rippling through Motown.

Charles Atlas and Joseph Pilates were born one year apart and lived an almost identical lifespan.

Charles Atlas gave men bulging biceps that other people could admire.

Joseph Pilates told us how to gain the strength, stamina, flexibility, and grace to do whatever we want to do.

What do you want to do?

– Roy H. Williams

PS – Joseph loved Clara until the day he died.

Are your employees happy to follow you, or do they avoid you like a skunk at a garden party? Phillip Wilson says the more accessible you are as a leader, the more your business will thrive. But when leaders create a gap between themselves and their employees, they lose top talent and nudge workers toward unionization. Listen in as the famous Phillip Wilson explains to roving reporter Rotbart why “Approachable Leadership” is the only elevator that can lift employee morale, productivity, and retention. The button has been pressed and this elevator is about to up-up-up! But we’re holding the door open for you, hoping that you’ll join us at MondayMorningRadio.com

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 morning I heard myself answer, “I don’t care where you spend your money. The thing that matters most is what you say in your ads.”

The man didn’t believe me.

But I believed me.

The direction of my future was altered by a few degrees in that singular, magical moment.

Moment #2, about 18 months later:

I was writing exceptional ads and everyone was dancing except me. I knew something was missing, but I didn’t know what. And it was bugging me.

I looked into my own eyes in the bathroom mirror for about a minute one morning. And then I said out loud, “Why am I not seeing better results?”

My reflection reached out from that mirror, slapped my face, grabbed my collar and pulled me in so closely that my nose was pressed into the glass. I could feel its breath on my ear as it whispered, “You are reaching too many people with too little repetition.”

You never forget a thing like that.

Moment #3: I was pondering the “Reach and Frequency Analysis” of my media schedule that had been calculated for me by the most famous data company in America and It said everything was fine. But I knew I was reaching too many people with too little repetition. That was the problem.

I found the cause of that problem – and the solution to it – buried deep in the methodology of how advertising everywhere is measured, sold, purchased, and evaluated.

Good science is distorted by our erroneous assumptions. We gather perfectly accurate data and then misinterpret it. We rarely question our assumptions, especially when they are part of the universally accepted way of “How Things are Done.”

If you could see the mistakes that hide in your blind spot, it would not be called “a blind spot.”

Misinterpretation of data is an irresistible tide that carries every boat in the wrong direction.

The first fatal mistake occurs so early in the process of data processing that we never really question it.

The second fatal mistake happens during the implementation stage. You assume that spreading your small ad budget across different media is the right thing to do because everyone does it. This idea of a “media mix” is practiced by all the largest advertisers and taught in every university. They say to their marketing students, “This is what the biggest companies do. You should imitate them.”

But here’s the dead fly in that bowl of soup: When a company has a much bigger ad budget than everyone else in their category, they can aim that firehouse across several media and soak everyone with relentless repetition.

But you don’t have a firehouse. You have a watering can.

If you use your watering can properly, you’ll be able to afford a garden hose. And if you use that garden hose properly, you will soon be able to afford a fire hose.

The water in your watering can should be used to water all the people you can reach with sufficient repetition.

“with sufficient repetition.”

“with sufficient repetition.”

Repetition is the non-negotiable you must protect at all cost.

When you reach too many people with too little repetition, no one gets wet, and you stay small.

NOTE: I am dangerously oversimplifying the solution when I say that you can achieve automatic, involuntary recall

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 to your ads, it is because (A.) you chose the wrong thing to talk about, or (B.) you are talking about it in a predictable way.

I wrote an ad this morning for a jewelry store. This is how the ad begins:

RICK: Sicily is the island at the toe of the boot of Italy,

SARAH: and the town of Catania is situated on the seashore, staring at the toe of that boot.

MONICA: That’s where Jay, one of our owners, traveled to meet Italy’s most exciting new jewelry designer.

RICK: Tell us about it, Jay.

JAY: When I met Francesco and saw what he was working on, I almost hyperventilated.

Those 5 lines do not sound like the typical jewelry store ad.

But I’ll bet you’d like to hear the rest of it.

Let’s talk for a moment about another obvious truth:

FACT: Ads rarely work for products that people don’t want. The ad writers and the media will always get the blame, but the real mistake is made when business owners convince themselves that advertising can sell things that no one wants.

Advertising cannot, in fact, do that.

I recently spoke to a friend who sent out 20,000 postcards that failed to get a response. This led him to conclude that “direct mail doesn’t work.”

When he told me what was featured on those 20,000 postcards, I told my friend the truth. “Your experiment proved only that a weak offer gets weak results. Direct mail didn’t fail. Your offer did.”

Your objective determines the rules you must play by.

Direct Response – immediate result advertising – can be measured with ROAS (Return On Ad Spend.) Pay-per-click is perhaps the most common type of direct response advertising, but direct response offers are routinely made using every type of media. If you plan to introduce, explain, and sell a product or service to a customer with whom you have no previous relationship, you are rolling the dice of direct response. You can always measure the effectiveness of direct response ads with ROAS.

Direct Response is a sport for surfers who like to ride the wave of a trend. It is a wild and crazy rollercoaster ride of feast-and-famine. If you like excitement, you should definitely do it. But be aware that the most successful direct response marketers are spending 25% to 35% percent of top line revenues on advertising. You need at least a 20x markup to play that game.

I prefer sowing and reaping. Seedtime and harvest.

Brand Building creates a long-term bond with the customer. The goal of brand building is to make your name the one that customers think of immediately – and feel the best about – when they finally need what you sell. Your Return on Ad Spend –ROAS – will look terrible when you first begin, but it will get better and better as you build a relationship with the public. In the long run, nothing can touch brand building. It is always the most cost-effective way to invest your ad budget if you have patience, confidence, and a good ad writer.

Roy H. Williams

Twenty-eight million viewers tuned...

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. They are not interchangeable.

Advertising is like that. Each of the characteristics of highly effective advertising are distinctly separate from one another. They are not interchangeable.

Natural diamonds can be an infinite number of shades of yellow, grey, brown, green, blue, red, or a mixture thereof. Diamonds can also be colorless.

The only thing more valuable than a colorless diamond is an extremely colorful one.

Color is a measurement of rarity, not beauty.

Clarity is another measurement of rarity, not beauty.

“Flawless” clarity refers to a diamond which is free of inclusions under 10x magnification. But under 40x magnification every flawless diamond is swimming with inclusions that cannot be seen under 10x. So get this idea of “flawless” out of your head, okay? It is a myth.

Seven clarity grades below flawless is another clarity known as SI2, which looks flawless to the naked eye. Not even a jeweler can tell the difference without 10x magnification. But there is a huge difference in price between flawless and SI2 because Clarity is a measurement of rarity, not beauty, remember?

Carat weight is how the size of a diamond is measured. We’ll come back to this in a minute.

Cut does not refer to the shape of the diamond, but to the ability of the diamond to gather light, bounce it between the facets, and then shine it upward toward the eyes. When diamonds are cut perfectly, they do not leak light out of the bottom of the diamond. A perfectly cut diamond returns 100% of internalized light upward and outward in a wild spectacle of sparkles.

You want sparkles, but you also want carat weight.

When you cut a diamond crystal perfectly, you lose more than half of that diamond’s Carat weight. But if you cheat the cut a little, the diamond won’t sparkle as much but it will weigh more and sell for more money.

If you cut the diamond with a thick girdle and a deep pavilion, the diamond will be dull because its internal mirrors will be misaligned, but it will be much heavier than if it were cut properly.

A Carat is a unit of weight. There are 141.748 Carats in an ounce. This means that a small pouch of 1-Carat diamonds worth just $4,000 each will cost you $567,000 an ounce.

Pure gold is less than $3,000 an ounce.

Are you beginning to understand why diamond cutters are loath to grind away precious carat weight in the quest for maximum sparkle?

Your logical mind tells you that it should be possible to create a diamond algorithm that says, “one colorgrade = 0.05 carats = 0.78 of a clarity grade = 2.13% excess weight above the projected carat weight for a perfectly cut diamond of this diameter.”

Your logical mind tells you this because you continue to believe that dissimilar properties such as color, clarity, carat weight, and cut can be quantified, codified, and reconciled.

In truth, they cannot.

Buying advertising is even more complicated than buying diamonds.

The rubric used to calculate the Gross Rating Points achieved in media schedules makes perfect sense until you realize it equates dissimilar properties and treats them as though they are...

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.

But there is also such a thing as negative hope. It promises salvation but delivers only hubris, which is desperation disguised as confidence.

Negative hope is attractive, addictive, and cruel.

Gamblers sitting around a poker table are the perfect portrait of negative hope. They ride a rollercoaster of elation and despair but tell themselves they have a system.

A second portrait of negative hope is a lottery ticket, a receipt issued by the government to citizens who pay a voluntary tax because they believe in lucky numbers and are extremely bad at math.

Bernie Madoff was a salesman of negative hope. He wore the mask of a self-made billionaire, but behind that mask was a desperate little con man who stole money from innocent people who believed they had been admitted into the inner circle of a genius who had a secret system.

The world is full of elegant and attractive people who sell negative hope. One of them will sell you a worthless education by promising you a better-paying job. Another will sell you a garage full of crap by convincing you of the miracle of multilevel marketing. A third will sell you the promise of inner peace by convincing you they have it, and that it can be transferred to you for money.

Negative hope is attractive, but you can easily recognize it now that you know what to look for.

I’m really glad we got that out of the way because now I’ve got some great news for you: inner peace is real.

And here’s some even better news: you can have it for free, no strings attached.

Inner peace is honesty, openness, forgiveness, acceptance, optimism, loyalty and love. All of these can be yours for free. But first you have to give them away.

It is a simple but fascinating system. The more you give these 7 things to others, the more richly they accumulate in you.

Five hundred and eleven Christmases have come and gone since Giovanni Giocondo sent his Christmas letter to a friend in 1513. It said, “No peace lies in the future that is not hidden in this present little instant. Take peace!”

Likewise, I say to you, inner peace is hidden in this present little instant.

Reach out and take it. It’s yours.

Roy H. Williams

When roving reporter Rotbart was a financial columnist with The Wall Street Journal, he met a young man named Steve Jobs who left a lasting impression on him. “When I spoke with Jason Schappert,” Rotbart says, “it felt like I was talking with Steve Jobs again.” Jason Schappert recently launched an AI-powered investment platform for middle-class consumers, providing the same insights and tools typically reserved for the ultra-rich. Today you have an opportunity to learn from Jason Schappert about how to identify opportunities, make bold decisions, and leverage your passion as roving reporter Rotbart meets with him at MondayMorningRadio.com

Fifty years ago, I was a teenager with an unreliable automobile. But that’s never a problem for an Oklahoma boy who has knowledge, tools, and daylight.

My knowledge and tools were always with me, but the daylight disappeared at the worst possible time, no matter how badly I needed it.

Cell phones had not yet been invented.

When the batteries in my flashlight died, nothing could be seen but the desperation, defeat, and despair of a boy at the side of the road trying to repair a car in the darkness.

Any person who stopped to help me with a bright beam of light seemed like an angel sent from God.

People who are lost, lonely and frightened are all around us but we seldom see them because fear, sadness, and despair look exactly like preoccupation, concentration, and distraction. This is how people in pain disappear into the scenery around us.

But sometimes the beam of light within you will reveal a person directly in front of you who needs your help. Will you pass by on the other side of the road, or will you stop and share your light?

I’m not just talking about random strangers. I’m talking about people whose names you know, people who are already in your life; coworkers, colleagues and employees who are walking with an invisible limp, people whose sunlight has receded below the horizon.

You can shine some light into their darkness:

1. Find a moment when it is just the two of you.
2. Look at them and say their name.
3. Say, “Do you know what I’ve always admired about you?”
4. Describe specific moments that quietly impressed you.
5. Tell them the truth about themselves. Remind them of who they are, and how much they matter, and why they belong.

This is often all it takes to recharge a person’s batteries and help them get their motor running again. When you shine your light into their heart, you elevate their hope and brighten their future.

The mark of a strong leader who is deeply loved is that they lift up the people around them by speaking the encouraging truth into their lives, regardless of whether a person needs it or not.

It is a gift that is always welcome.

Roy H. Williams

“Leadership is not a static trait but an evolving journey,” says Bob Kaplan, a high-level management expert with over three decades of experience. “Even ‘born leaders,’ need training, desire, and experience to achieve real greatness,” he says, and then he adds, “The most challenging people to manage are always the leaders themselves.” Bob Kaplan believes CEOs and other C-suite executives should continually invite feedback — good and bad — and then concentrate on eliminating their shortcomings as they continually refine their skills. Hey! Do you want to run with the big dogs or stay on the porch? Roving reporter Rotbart says he will begin his interview of Bob Kaplan the moment you arrive at MondayMorningRadio.com. Aroo!