Roy H. Williams, Roy H. Williams Marketing, Buda, Texas
by Jerry Vigil
The Wizard Of Ads is more than a book about copy writing. It’s a book about advertising, a book about running a business, a book about people. It’s even a book about life itself. It’s author, Roy H. Williams, started out like many of us, with a menial job in radio, and quickly worked his way into his own multimillion dollar marketing firm. His story is fascinating, yet his secret is so simple. In fact, it’s not a secret at all. His wisdom is in book form for anyone to get his or her hands on. He even has an email list of thousands that get his weekly Monday Morning Memo, short essays written by Roy, 101 of which make up the book. By the time this short interview was over, it was obvious we had just spoken with one of advertising’s greats. Read the interview. Get the book. Get on the email list. This Wizard is for real.
JV: Tell us about your background in the business and how Roy H. Williams Marketing came to be?
Roy: I started in radio about twenty years ago in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a little AM station that was all Christian programming. I was hired to change tapes once a week in the middle of the night. I was doing that literally to have money to buy milk for the baby. Then I began to realize that there were no commercials on my station, and I asked the manager, “Why are there no commercials on our station?” He said, “Well, nobody wants to buy any.” I said, “Well, is there anybody out there trying to sell any?” And he said, “Well, no.” So I volunteered and began selling part-time and soon began selling full-time. My goal from the beginning was figuring out how to make it work because these were all very, very small advertisers, and I was taking the rent money. If what I did didn’t pay off, then they were going to have a huge financial catastrophe.
So, when you’ve been given the opportunity to experiment with other people’s money all day every day for a number of years, you begin to figure out some things, particularly when you have intimate contact with the client. So, over a number of years, I was able to gain a reputation of making enough small businesses into very large businesses that more and more businesses started buying ads from us simply to get the spots I would write and the schedules I would recommend on other stations. Then it finally evolved to where everybody was asking, “Hey, why don’t I just pay you to handle all my advertising?”
Here we are twenty years later, and I have a staff of eighteen people. We currently have schedules on about 550 stations in thirty-eight states along with thirty or forty TV contracts and our own in-house radio and television production and research facilities. We’re currently doing about twenty-one million dollars and are working only with owner-operated small businesses.
JV: How did your book, The Wizard Of Ads, come about?
Roy: It began whenever we started having more clients than I could actually deal with intimately on a weekly basis. I realized that all of them needed to hear from me, even if I didn’t have the time to talk to them on the phone. So I began writing a little one-sheet called the “Monday Morning Memo.” It was always just something to think about, and I sent it out to all of our clients just to let them feel that I was thinking about them. Then I was putting more and more time into the little weekly note I was sending out—six or eight, sometimes ten hours in a week. Then clients started asking if their friends could receive this. Currently, it’s being distributed to about three thousand businesses nationally and internationally, and we never started charging for it. We send out the Monday Morning Memo by fax and by e-mail at no charge. It goes out in the middle of the night on Sunday nights so that it’s there first thing Monday morning when people come into work. Then America’s premier business publisher, Ray Bard of Bard Press, somehow got hold of some of the Monday Morning Memos and called and said, “I would like to publish some of these into a book. How many of them do you have?” I showed him the archives, we picked a hundred of them, and the rest is history.
JV: I take it you’ve been writing these memos for years. You must have quite an archive.
Roy: Actually, I only began writing them not quite four years ago. When you write one a week, you obviously have fifty-two a year. I had been writing them for about two and a half years when I first saw Ray Bard, and I had maybe a hundred and thirty for him to choose from. We’re already seventy chapters into the sequel, which will be called “Secret Formulas of The Wizard Of Ads.”
JV: The Wizard Of Ads has three sections. The first is “Turning Words Into Magic.” What will readers get from this section of the book?
Roy: The single biggest problem in advertising today is that people try to make it more of a science than it really is, and everybody is focused on reaching the right people. Advertising sales reps are out there explaining to the business owner in effect that the secret is to reach the right people, and that they “have the right people.” “Who’s your customer?” “Oh, that’s just who we have listening” or “That’s just who our reader is” or “That’s just who our viewer is.” And in reality, it doesn’t matter so much who you reach as much as it does what you say. And so it’s the copy, it’s the spot itself that is usually falling apart. And everyone in advertising tends to be guilty of this, because when you turn your attention to the importance of the ad itself, the message, then you begin to realize, “Gee, this would work on my station, and the next station. It would work on two-thirds of all the stations in town.”
That’s been our experience. Since we buy media nationwide, currently in thirty-eight states, we find that no matter what product category we’re buying for, there’s at least two-thirds of the media providers in the city that have an appropriate listener profile or viewer profile for who our customer is. So it’s not a function of picking exactly the right demographic or psychographic profile. That’s total crap. That is such a myth it’s unbelievable, and it leads to some pretty incredible disasters. You find that if you turn that energy toward making sure you have the right words, making sure you’re speaking to a felt need instead of simply answering the questions that no one is asking, then you’ll find it does amazing things for the campaign and the client.
JV: The very first chapter in Part One is “Nine Secret Words.” The nine words are, “The risk of insult is the price of clarity.” Elaborate on this.
Roy: I believe that words are electric and should be judged by the emotional voltage they carry. If a word or a phrase doesn’t shock a little, then it has no emotional voltage. You must have a message strong enough to move people, strong enough to cause them to take an action other than the one they were planning to take. And the risk of such a strong message is that while it will move people, it will not move them all in the same direction.
We have what we actually call the knucklehead factor, and most people don’t realize that a lot of major record companies measure the knucklehead factor in focus groups. It’s simply this: if a song is going to become a hit, at least five to fifteen percent of the people who hear that song have to absolutely hate the song. They have to detest it. They have to be prepared to change the channel any time they hear that song on the radio because if a song doesn’t inspire that kind of passion in at least five to fifteen percent of the people, then it can’t possibly inspire a positive reaction in forty to fifty percent of the people. And that’s the profile of a hit song. Forty or fifty percent of the people absolutely love it. Five to fifteen percent of the people absolutely hate it. And that thirty-five to forty-five percent in the middle, they can take it or leave it. Now a song that never makes the charts is one that gets no complaints. It’s a song that five to ten percent of the people love, eighty or ninety percent of the people can take it or leave it, and nobody hates it. That’s where radio copy is, and that’s where TV copy is. Even newspaper and magazine ads are trying to play it safe; they’re trying to walk that middle path. And because they don’t want to risk alienating anyone, they refuse to move anyone into a new course of action at all. They wind up just being blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Our advice in chapter one of The Wizard Of Ads is: the risk of insult is the price of clarity. You must have a powerful message, and you must say it clearly and let the chips fall where they may.
JV: The whole first section is just loaded with great little tidbits just like that. One that especially caught my attention was the chapter titled “Intellect Versus Emotion.”
Roy: In the seminar that I do, I spend about an hour on this whole issue of intellect versus emotion. It is one of the four tugs of war in the human mind. Let me point out that when a person becomes increasingly emotional, they are proportionally less intellectual. And when a person is highly intellectual, he or she is being very unemotional. They are mutually exclusive. Everyone has intellect, and everyone has emotion. But you cannot be highly intellectual and highly emotional at the same time. Now, good ads will either speak to the intellect, or they will speak to the emotion. However, far too many ads speak to the intellect when they should not because very few decisions are made intellectually. Most decisions are made emotionally. The American public does what they feel to be the right thing. Then they use their intellect to justify what their emotions have already decided. And so, there’s an old saying: “A man convinced against his will is unconvinced still.” You must win the heart, and the mind will surely follow. This is what I try and make ad writers understand. When a person wants that new car, they can find all kinds of logical reasons why it makes perfect sense.
JV: The copywriters at radio stations are usually the production people, the Continuity Directors, or even the salespeople. One thing we often talk about in the pages of RAP is getting the client to understand that perhaps these station personnel know more about producing and writing commercials than the client does. I think a lot of clients in radio tend to think they know what they need, and they’ll slam a print ad in front of the sales rep and say, “Here. I want to list all these items in my ad.” What can a salesperson or production person do to convince the client that he knows more about advertising?
Roy: Well, number one, I think there a lot of people writing ads who think they know more who really don’t. If a person actually knows what they’re doing, they should be able to explain why they are doing what they’re doing. Anyone who truly knows what they’re doing should be able to explain very convincingly to an advertiser why the thing they are suggesting is wrong. And I’ve never met anybody who was so hardheaded that they weren’t impressed whenever I was able to explain to them specifically and in detail why their methodology would fail. When you can give them examples, when you can give them research data, when you can give them literal case studies that are perfectly analogous to their situation…. In other words, if all these continuity people and salespeople would actually study what it is they pretend to be talking about, they wouldn’t have these problems.
I have never found anybody who actually had any idea what they were doing. And that is one of the reasons we’re beginning a school here in February. I got so sick of hearing people in the advertising profession talk about branding. Every time somebody brings up branding, I want to say, “Well, what is branding exactly?” And I’ve never found one of those empty suits who could explain it to me. They’ll all say, “Well, you know…branding!” And they’ll go off on some bizarre tangent about what they think branding is when, in reality, there is real branding, and I’ll explain it in a moment. But in reality, most people using the term are just throwing around a buzzword to make it sound like they’re big shots and that they know something nobody else knows. And what happens is that the client says, “Well, okay. So what are you talking about? How do I do that? How does it work?” And then he sits there and listens to this drivel that the salesperson or the Continuity Director puts out—blah, blah, blah—and he knows they’re making it up. He knows they’re full of crap. And that’s why I say it’s really not hard to convince advertisers.
We reject dozens and dozens of companies every year. As a matter of fact, it has gotten to the point where whenever a company calls our office, which is usually two or three times a day—they call from all over America—and says they want to hire our firm to do their advertising, we say the first thing you have to do is fly to Austin at our convenience to be interviewed by our staff, to see if we’ll take your account. That scares off a lot of them. So far this year, sixty-five companies have flown to Austin to be interviewed by the staff. Now, of those sixty-five, we’ve only accepted nine as new clients. The point is, we’ve never had problems explaining that we know what we’re talking about. We can prove what we’re talking about, and I’ve never had anybody say, “Oh, well, I disagree.” You know why? Because there are very few people out there in this business who have any idea what they’re talking about. The advertising business is full of professional BS artists, and I for one am simply putting my foot down and saying, “Hey, look guys, if you’re going to be pretending you know what you’re talking about, prove it. Back it up. Where did you learn this stuff? How can you make it make sense?”
Now, let me finish about branding. Do you know what branding really is, Jerry?
JV: No. I would just guess that it is imprinting the name of the company or their slogan in the person’s mind.
Roy: Well, that’s actually the best answer I’ve heard so far. Branding was discovered in 1904, and the man who discovered it was awarded a Nobel Prize for it. Ivan Pavlov. Remember Pavlov’s dogs? Branding. When he rubbed the meat paste on the tongue of dog, he rang a little bell. The bell is known as the reticular activator. Branding only works if the dog already loves the taste of meat. Branding, if you want a definition, is simply the implementation of an associative memory. Now, here’s what’s crazy. Psychologists have been studying the functions of the human mind for a hundred years. Why do advertising people not have a consulting psychologist? Our firm does, a consulting psychologist in Dr. Nick Grant and a consulting neurologist in Dr. Pierce Howard. If the medical profession has been studying the functioning of the human mind and the functions of the physical human brain for a hundred years, why have advertising people never bothered to check into that?
So, whenever you start studying this stuff, you find out, “Hey, this is really simple. This is easy as hell. This is amazingly easy.” You find that Ivan Pavlov can explain in detail that to associate the sound of the bell with something that’s not already in the heart of the dog, so to speak, the public, is futile, and it won’t work. It’s pointless. The love of the taste of the meat was already in the heart of the dog. Pavlov simply had to associate the ad, or the sound of the bell, with something that was already in the dog’s heart.
Let’s take the Taco Bell campaign. That’s a branding campaign. The Taco Bell Chihuahua is the reticular activator. The bell, if you will, is the Chihuahua. Now, what is it that we’re speaking to in the heart of the American public? What is it that we’re actually selling with that Chihuahua? If you’ll stop and think about it, we’re selling an identity, a lifestyle. It’s the little, powerless underdog with attitude. It’s the same thing with the two guys in the little Volkswagen going, “dah, dah, dah.” What happens is, in this generation of younger people, there’s this sense of impotence that they can’t make a difference. But they have style. They have attitude, and they identify so strongly with that Chihuahua because he’s not a big dog. He’s not a powerful dog. But he’s a hip little dog. He’s a cool little dog. He does his own thing and has his own style. So that self-image is already in the heart of the Taco Bell prospective customer, and that little Chihuahua is the symbol for something that’s already in the heart of the customer. They’re relating their ridiculous junk food to that sense of self-image in the American public.
That campaign will work. However, the Nissan campaign failed miserably. Why? Because it was extremely entertaining, but not persuasive. It did not anchor to anything in the heart of the American public. One of their spots was where GI Joe would drop out of the mouth of the tyrannosaurus rex, hop down into a little red plastic sports car, and go zooming down the hallway into Barbie’s summer dream house. Barbie looks down from the balcony and sees GI Joe. Then Ken comes out on the balcony after they’re driving off and says, “Oh, no!” Well, Nissan’s sales declined steadily throughout that entire campaign. It wasn’t because we didn’t like the ad. We adored the ad. We loved the ad. But the ad was not anchored to anything in the heart of the American public.
Too many ads today and too many copywriters are entertaining or informative rather than persuasive. An ad can be informative without being persuasive. It can also be entertaining without being persuasive. And those writers very often think they are good writers, when in reality, if it ain’t persuasive, it ain’t persuasive. As a matter of fact, the Monday Morning Memo that will go out this weekend is about the psychological concepts of primacy and recency. These things are not subject to debate. These things have been thoroughly researched for decades, and are things that are known by psychologists world-wide.
When we began discussing with Dr. Grant what we were planning to do, using psychological concepts, he said, “Well certainly ad firms do this already. Certainly all the TV and radio stations have psychologists on staff, don’t they?” And I said, “No,” He was dumbfounded. He was absolutely speechless. So I began doing some research. You know what I found? This will blow your mind. We were talking about Ivan Pavlov a moment ago. Well, Ivan Pavlov in 1904 had a student named John B. Watson. The student was hired by a man who owned an advertising firm. The ad firm became the largest in the world. The man’s name was J. Walter Thompson. Now, why do all the radio people in America think they know so damn much about advertising when not one of them has ever spent ten minutes studying it?
JV: That’s very interesting, and I really like what you said about spots that entertain. We hear so much about how spots and promos should entertain the audience if they’re going to work, but you’re saying it’s not about that.
Roy: No. Entertaining the listener is entertaining the listener, and if you want to spend a fortune to entertain the listener, then go after that. Let me tell you how this little company works. The reason we’re so fussy about who we accept as clients is because, rather than charge as an advertising agency would normally charge, we get a healthy retainer for what is called the “uncovery.” The uncovery is a process where we isolate the client’s unique selling proposition. We define who they are and what they’re about. We find the story that is uniquely and wonderfully their own. The client doesn’t get to tell us what they want. We tell them what they need to do. The second thing we do is take the budget, and we choose how to deliver that message in the most convincing possible fashion. The client doesn’t have a thing to say about it. Now, we take a rather small salary every month for twelve months, and whatever has to be done in the way of TV and radio production—copywriting, analysis, market research, all those things—no charge. We just take a small salary. At the end of one year, however, the client must adjust our salary by the same percentage that we have adjusted his gross income. If we double his business, he has to double our salary or fire us. And if we double it again the following year, he has to double it again or fire us.
Now here’s what happens. When you know what you’re doing, and you know how to make people rich, you can make thousands of dollars an hour. Last month was an extremely good month for me. We deposited just over eight hundred thousand dollars, best month we’ve ever had. And that’s not media dollars either. That’s dollars we get to keep. None of that is agency commissions. None of that is creative fees. All of that is just the result of partnership. Whenever you’re able to deliver what it is that all ad people promise, you’ll find that the world beats a path to your door. You’ll go crazy when you know how to make advertising work. I’m actually flying to Hawaii on Saturday to do a seminar for seven radio stations out there, the Capstar stations. I’ll be spending a day literally teaching their staff how to make it work. Then I’ll be spending another day talking to local advertisers about how to make it work.
JV: Are you doing a lot of seminars for radio?
Roy: Yeah. As a matter of fact we’ve got two a month scheduled for the next three years, and we may be willing to take a third one each month. But we won’t take more than that. There are very, very, very few open slots left. We do have seminars in Austin about once a quarter, however. It’s an all-day seminar, and anybody who wants to come is free to come. There’s no charge. We built a movie theater upstairs, and it seats about forty people. Usually we announce in the Monday Morning Memo three or four weeks prior to the seminar that we have one coming up, and we have people come in from all over the country.
JV: Any plans for a video?
Roy: We probably won’t do that. A videotape series would be too much of a talking head kind of thing. In person I can keep it pretty well stimulating, but just sitting there watching it on a screen kind of scares me. But I do have an eight-hour audiotape series. We’ve sent out over five hundred of the audiotape series so far, and we’re sending those out in exchange for one hundred spots per station. We don’t care how big the station is. Our impact on that station is relative to their spot rate, so no matter how big or how small the stations are, we’ll send the eight-hour audiotape training series out for a hundred spots. They’re not available for cash. We won’t sell them at any price. And the hundred spots, obviously, are used to promote my book, The Wizard Of Ads. So, it’s kind of a win-win situation. The more books that sell in a marketplace, the more the local businesses in that city will buy radio or television advertising. The only thing we really bash is print, but radio and television both have the power of the spoken word. They have the power of sound. Echoic retention is another one of those psychological terms that is incredibly, incredibly important in television and radio, and nobody knows about it. But the difference between iconic retention and echoic retention is just staggering. The greatest lie ever told is that one picture is worth a thousand words. Psychologists have been laughing at that for decades. It’s simply not true.
JV: Give us an idea of what part two in your book is about, “Turning Strangers into Customers.”
Roy: “Turning Strangers into Customers” just talks about what we call “the world inside your door.” It’s about running your business. Advertising is the world outside your door, and then turning strangers into customers is the world inside your door, the business of running a business. Once advertising has done its job, you have to make this customer happy they came. You have to make the customer glad they’re doing business with you.
JV: Tell us about the third section, “Turning Dreams Into Realities.”
Roy: That section is about making sure that you are happy that you’re doing what you’re doing. One of the questions we ask in the book is, “How will you measure success? Do you love what you do?” As a matter of fact, section three is not much about business at all. Section three is just life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
JV: What’s one of your favorite chapters in this section?
Roy: I’d say it’s the chapter called, “Murphy Finally Figures It Out”, and just before that is the preview to that chapter called, “Celebrate the Ordinary.” Those are probably the two that I would suggest somebody would read back to back. We point out that Murphy’s Law is something every American knows: whatever can go wrong will go wrong. Then I take issue with that. I say, in reality, bad news is only reported by the media because it’s so rare. Good news is so abundant that it’s not even considered news at all. Good things happen relentlessly and continually in our lives, and for some reason we stay focused on the bad. Why is that? I basically feel sorry for Murphy for having such a negative outlook on everything.
In the sequel, “Murphy Finally Figures It Out,” I point out that if you do a little research, you’ll find that there really was a guy named Murphy. Most people don’t realize that his name was Edsel Murphy and that he actually had eleven different Murphy’s Laws. The one we know as “whatever can go wrong will go wrong” is actually Murphy’s Law number three, and it’s simply the best known. I think maybe his plan was to have an even ten laws, but in later years he had a revelation and wrote his insightful eleventh law. Law number eleven kind of indicates that maybe he got it all figured out, and that it’s not the creation around us that’s against us. For example, law number ten is “Mother Nature is a bitch.” These are very vitriolic laws. He’s raging at the cosmos in ten laws, but number eleven is just fascinating. It says, “it is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.” He figured out that the problem isn’t the universe. The problem is people. The problem is us, and we’re the ones who keep screwing things up. So, by just pointing out those kinds of things, I want to give people new information, but I also want to give them a new perspective.
JV: How’s the book selling?
Roy: According to my publisher, Ray Bard, this week we should make the Wall Street Journal best seller list, the Business Week best seller list, and the USA Today best seller list. He said last week’s sales figures indicated to him that we should have a lock on those three best seller lists. The book is currently in its third printing. Oddly enough, the average business book in America only sells five thousand copies in its entire life. The Wizard Of Ads already has sixty thousand copies in print. We’re about to have to go into our fourth printing because the sixty thousand are almost all sold out.
JV: A talented Creative Director of a radio station called me recently, inquiring about what I thought of his potential for success should he should leave the radio station and open up an ad agency. A lot of people in radio want to do this. What answer and advice would you give him?
Roy: I’m asked this question often, and my real questions are about commitment and staying power. How much does it take for this person to get by every month? Do they have staying power? Because I can promise them at least a year of real hell, working way harder than they’re being paid for. And if people think they’re going to be treated fairly and right and that everything is going to be good and fun, they’re simply out of their minds, and they need to keep taking a paycheck from an employer. But if a person is willing to pay the price in blood, and they’re willing to work far too many hours for far too little money for at least a year or two or maybe even three, then yeah, the world is your oyster. You can get ridiculously rich in this business if you’re good. The question is, is he good, or does he just think he’s good?
And just as importantly, if he has talent, that doesn’t really mean crap. You have to explain to all the morons why your thing will work. If they like it, that doesn’t matter. The client likes bad stuff. The client likes an ad though it doesn’t work. You may go out there and say, “This is good. Do you like it?” And the guy says, “Yeah, I like it.” If you think you’ve done your job, you’re in a fool’s paradise because when it doesn’t pay off and sales don’t increase, you’d have been a whole lot better off with a spot the client hated but made him rich.
So, to know what you’re talking about, to be able to prove that you know what you’re talking about, and to be able to explain in detail why your ad will work and the other ad won’t, that’s when you start making money. Can this guy do that?
A lot of people are creative, funny, and witty. There are people who contact us here continually who want to explain to us how much talent they have for writing funny ads. Gee, I’m not Jerry Seinfeld. I don’t care whether it’s funny or not. Does it sell products? Will it cause people to take an action they were not going to take otherwise? Show me a track record. Show me the people you’ve made rich.
JV: I take it you don’t do a lot of funny commercials.
Roy: No. Actually, humor is a lot like music. I believe in jingles. I believe in humor. I believe both of them are incredibly powerful, and they’re also extremely dangerous. Because they are powerful, they have the potential to blow up in your face. It’s like nitroglycerin. Used correctly, it’s a powerful tool. Humor and music, either one, if used incorrectly, you blow sky high.
JV: Why aren’t you afraid that all the ad agencies out there are going to grab your book, learn all your secrets, and take business away from you?
Roy: It doesn’t matter. By the time we got our new office building built, we’d already outgrown it. We moved in March and wished we had built it twice as big. So I’ve just drawn a line in the sand and said, I’m not going to make this company much bigger than what it is right now. And we’re anxious to teach other people how to do what we’re doing.
JV: What can people get off your website at www.mondaymemo.com?
Roy: It’s the archive of all the Monday Memos that are not in The Wizard Of Ads. The Wizard Of Ads is a hundred and one chapters that you won’t find on the website, but all of the chapters that aren’t in the book are at mondaymemo.com. And you can also subscribe to the Monday Memo on the website, and you’ll start getting one each week by e-mail.
JV: Well, get ready for a bunch of new subscriptions to that.
Roy: Sure.