Effective advertising is not about delivering information; it is about delivering persuasion.

Don’t tell your audience how to feel.

Make them feel.

Great ad writers are secret poets.

Poetry is not about making words rhyme. Poetry is about leading people to a realization.

Poetic ad writers open your eyes and cause you to realize.

They lead you to a conclusion, then let you discover it for yourself.

Great writers don’t tell you. They show you.

This poem will do that:

What of the watchman on the wall?

What says the watchman?

“It is 10pm, let the night begin.”

What says the watchman?

“It is 11 at night, everything is all right.”

What says the watchman?

“It is midnight, the bell has rung. Every song has been sung.”

What says the watchman?

“It it is 1am, I am all alone. I am all alone.”

What says the watchman?

“It is 2am, scrolling on my phone.”

What says the watchman?

What says the watchman?

What says the watchman?

What says the watchman?

The watchman watched his phone.

The enemy arrived.

The watchman is gone.

Don’t just deliver information. Deliver persuasion.

Open their eyes. Make them realize.

When they see what you see, they will do what you want them to.

Win the heart and the mind will follow.

The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided.

Roy H. Williams

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn helps executives, entrepreneurs, and leadership teams make smarter, more confident choices and avoid costly mistakes. As a Decision Science strategist, Cheryl developed the widely used AREA Method, a framework designed to help leaders challenge assumptions, reduce cognitive bias, and improve judgment in high-stakes situations.

In this week’s episode of Monday Morning Radio, Cheryl explains to roving reporter Rotbart that while “gut instinct” plays a valuable role in business, too many leaders rely on it entirely, rather than grounding their decisions in real-world testing, stakeholder input, rigorous analysis, and evidence. Listen and learn at MondayMorningRadio.com

Find out what people already want, then offer them exactly that. Quit trying to convince customers that they should want what you are selling.

Speak to everyone, everywhere, about widely felt needs, deeply held beliefs, and personal values. Quit telling yourself that you need to reach “the right people” with your advertising.

1. A: The media doesn’t make the message work. The message makes the media work. I’ve never seen a business fail because they were were reaching the wrong people. But I’ve seen hundreds fail because they were saying the wrong things.
2. B: Anyone who has a friend, a relative, a co-worker, or a neighbor is an influencer. Is there anyone that you DON’T want to say good things about you?
3. C: Powerful brands like Ferrari, Rolex, and Harley Davidson are known, loved, and admired by hundreds of millions of people who will never own a Ferrari, a Rolex, or a Harley. Do you think those brands would be better off if they were known only to the people that the brands chose to “target” as potential customers?

Customers buy from personalities they know, like, and trust.

1. A: People don’t bond with corporations, they bond with personalities.
2. B: Brands that have personalities are exactly as real to us as our favorite characters in novels, television shows, cartoons, and movies. Who doesn’t love R2D2, C3PO, and Yoda? You realize those characters are purely imaginary, right? But we feel as though we know them.
3. C: Does your brand have a distinctive personality? If not, why not?

I will now summarize each of those 3 Steps in exactly 12 words.

People want friends, honesty, encouragement, access, and to know that they matter.

Buy mass media. Quit fishing with a hook. Use a net instead.

Don’t be so boring. Find some courage. Be a distinctively memorable personality.

1. Roy H. Williams

Zig Ziglar would have turned 100 this year.

This week, Tom Ziglar shares some little-known stories about his father with roving reporter Rotbart and deputy rover, Maxwell, including the fact that despite Zig’s worldwide fame, he once carried a stranger’s luggage to the guest’s hotel room simply because the out-of-towner took one look at Zig’s red sports coat and thought he was a bellman.

But todays episode is more than a nostalgic look backward, as Tom Ziglar offers a thoughtful meditation on legacy, leadership, and the enduring power of optimism. Things are looking UP at MondayMorningRadio.com.

I write this with reluctance because I know that I will receive hundreds of emails correcting me on a few niggling little details.

But write on, I must.

“Write on, write on, write on.”

“Cost of Compute” refers to the $8 to $13 that every AI company has to spend on electricity and short-lived computer chips for every $1 that comes through the door.

Losing a dozen dollars for every dollar you touch isn’t a problem when investors are showering you with cash from a fire hose.

But it’s beginning to look like the well has run dry.

I did not want to defend where I got my information, so I went to the Goog and asked, “Oh Great Googness, why are people referring to the S&P 500 as the “S&P 10”?

Check this out, cub scout, straight from the AI of the Almighty Google:

“The S&P 500 is being referred to as the “S&P 10″ because a handful of massive technology-related companies dominate the index’s performance. Due to market-cap weighting, these top 10 stocks disproportionately influence the index’s total return, making the ‘broad market’ performance heavily reliant on these few, AI-exposed companies. More than $40 of every $100 invested in the S&P 500 is going into just 10 companies, creating a high level of concentration not seen in decades. In some recent periods, those top 10 stocks have accounted for nearly 90% of the entire index’s gains, indicating that the remaining 490+ stocks contribute very little to the overall upward movement.”

Allow me to highlight Three Big Problems.

1. Manufacturing companies, food companies, service companies, and all the other cash-hungry hopefuls that are the true wonders of the American economy have not been able to raise any money because way too many people have been dumping everything they’ve got into AI.
2. That money has now slowed down, which means that a lot of AI dependent companies are now being burned by their “burn rate,” a slang term for “precisely how fast they are losing money.”
3. AI is getting worse, not better, despite the fact that everyone is repeating like parrots, “AI is worse now than it will ever be. Hour by hour, AI will just keep getting better and better forever and ever.”

Okay, I can tell from the look of doubt that I see in your eyes that you need me to explain a little bit more about Problem Number 3.

They can’t raise prices fast enough to stop the bleeding, so most of the AI companies have reduced their Cost of Compute by 86%.

“But how?” you ask.

Here’s how. In the recent past, you could give your $200/mo AI some detailed instructions and it would go on a deep dive to bring you the golden nuggets of information that you requested. The 86% savings of Compute Cost is because they instructed the AI to just look in the cache for what they told someone else who asked a similar question. You get a recycled answer, and the AI company saves 86%.

I’ll wrap this up by giving you the storyteller’s definition of “inflection point.”

Bad storytellers say, “This happened, then This happened, then This happened, then This happened, then This happened.”

Real stories happen like this: “This happened, THEREFORE this happened, BUT then, This happened.”

“BUT then, This happened” is called “an Inflection Point.”

“So what’s going to happen next?”

Let’s wait and see.

Roy H. Williams