It was 3AM on a Saturday morning several decades ago.

I was flipping toggle switches and twisting knobs in the control room of the smallest radio station in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The equipment we were using dated back to the dawn of broadcasting. If anyone made a joke about radio, my station was the punch line.

Someone had left a trade magazine in the control room. I noticed the headline of a full-page ad purchased by Gannett Broadcasting. It said, “Radio Has Involvement.”

That word “involvement” hit me like lightning. I felt the tingle of it rippling across my skin.

“Involvement” now occupies a place in my mind called, “We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident…”

Another truth that I hold to be self-evident is, “If it makes sense to me, it will make sense to other people.”

My work of the past 50 years has been built on these two, self-evident truths:

1. Involvement
2. Don’t try to create it. Find where it already exists and connect to it.
3. Make Sense
4. People believe what makes sense to them.

Each of us has a system of preferences and beliefs that governs how we think, speak, act, and see the world.

Those same preferences and beliefs give us a sense of personal identity, and we express that identity in every choice that we make.

People used to put bumper stickers on their cars as an expression of personal identity. They wanted everyone to know exactly what kind of person was driving that little blue Ford Fiesta. Today we identify with sports teams, influencers, footwear, colleges, political parties, beer, investment strategies, places of origin and hundreds of other things.

Advertisers: do not fall into the trap of trying to find people who share several characteristics.

Write your ads to focus on a single feeling that is shared by an enormous number of people. If not a feeling, then a belief, a preference, a superstition or an attraction that is shared by an enormous number of people.

You can create a deep and lasting relationship with a person even though there is only a single characteristic that you both have in common.

Great ads connect with people on a single point of agreement.

If you can master what I have just told you, you can master every medium of communication.

Never forget that.

Roy H. Williams

PS – I wrote about this same idea but from a different perspective in the Monday Morning Memo of August 3rd, 2026. The following is a snippet from that memo:

Identity reinforcement is the essence of affinity groups.

An affinity group is any group of people who are attracted to the same thing.

Every religion is an affinity group.

The fans of a sports team are an affinity group.

People who follow fashion are an affinity group.

If you like jazz music, or hip-hop, or Jeeps or NASCAR or backpacking or sewing or science fiction or romance or current events or capitalism or gossip, you are in an affinity group.

Mass media and social media exist to attract and serve affinity groups.

The size of a business opportunity is largely determined by size of the affinity group it serves.

PPS – A great ad is a rhinoceros. It makes only one point, but it makes that point very powerfully. Most ads are porcupines. They waddle along making countless little points as they annoy the hell out of everyone.

Scott Woolley has made a career of venturing into unfamiliar territory.

Scott has stocked grocery shelves before dawn. He has built and sold businesses in industries that share no common denominator. Comedian Jerry Lewis was a mentor. Star Trek’s William Shatner is a friend. Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino is a business partner.

In a wide-ranging conversation with roving reporter Rotbart, Scott Wooley explains how curiosity, persistence, and a willingness to learn will open doors that you never dreamed would open. Check it out, Cub Scout, at MondayMorningRadio.com

The earth was stationary and the sun traveled around it. This was an established fact, and everyone knew it.

But Copernicus had the audacity to ask himself, “What if everyone is wrong?” Copernicus died of natural causes in May 1543, shortly after his revolutionary book was published.

Galileo was arrested, convicted, and punished by the Inquisition in 1633 for proving that Copernicus was right: “The sun does not revolve around the earth; the Earth revolves around the Sun.”

Giordano Bruno faced even harsher punishment than Galileo from the same Inquisition. Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy after proposing that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets, and that the universe was infinite.

Two thousand years before those three astronomers decided that everyone was wrong, Socrates asked himself, “What if everyone is wrong?”

He was sentenced to death for his teachings, but his “Socratic method” of using cross-examination to uncover truth evolved into our modern Scientific Method as well as our Modern Legal System of adversarial cross-examination in courtrooms.

“But the irrational persecution of innovators doesn’t happen anymore, right?”

After writing Common Sense, that legendary pamphlet that sparked the American Revolution and created this ongoing American Experiment, Thomas Paine wrote The Age of Reason, which criticized institutionalized religion. He was outlawed in Britain, narrowly escaped the guillotine in revolutionary France, and was completely ostracized in America. Thomas Paine died in poverty on June 8, 1809, in New York City’s Greenwich Village.

In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis asked himself “What if everyone is wrong?” Then he required every doctor in his Obstetrics ward at Vienna General Hospital to disinfect their hands before delivering a baby.

The death rate among young mothers in his Obstetrics ward fell from 18% to less than 2%.

These results proved that Semmelweis was correct in his theory about the transfer of disease, but the other doctors were so offended that they persecuted him into a nervous breakdown, then they had him committed to an insane asylum where he was beaten to death by the guards.

The death rate of young mothers who gave birth at Vienna General Hospital returned to 18 percent.

In 1903, George Bernard Shaw wrote, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.”

There are few thoughts as audacious or as powerful as when a person says to themselves, “What if everyone is wrong?”

I will tell you one last story.

My genius friend Matthew recently moved into a house in the middle of the woods in a faraway place.

Prior to moving away, he lived in Austin where he worked remotely for an old and famous technologist who looked long and hard at data centers and said to himself, “What if everyone is wrong?”

This old technologist recruited theoretical physicists, rare materials scientists, and a whole wonderland of other endangered species, one of which was my friend Matthew. He said to them, “The world does not need more data centers. It needs a whole new way of computing that uses one one-thousandth as much electricity.”

His team is not creating software or processors or any of the other things you associate with computers. They are inventing a whole new way of computing that will use less than one one-thousandth as much energy as today’s computers.

Sit with that for a minute.

Two weeks before he packed his stuff, sold his house, and drove away into the sunset, Matthew told us that the team recuited by the old technologist had achieved proof-of-concept. And then he showed us the proof and told us not to speak of it for at least a month.

He then described to us a few of the countless obstacles that would hinder the announcement, acceptance, adoption, and widespread distribution of this new method of computing.

Matthew continues to work for the old technologist whose team of endangered species is bringing his vision closer and closer to scalability. Matthew says that he is having more fun than he has ever had in his life.

I wish him the best. Don’t you?

Roy H. Williams

I began talking to business owners all day, every day, when I was twenty years old.

This is why I have I have been writing 20 ads per week for the past 48 years. Poke those numbers into your computer and you will see that my lifetime total will exceed 50,000 ads in just 4 more weeks.

This is what I have learned from 48 years of writing radio and TV ads for owner-operated businesses across the U.S., Canada, and Australia:

1. The game begins and ends with your ideas and your words. When your message is right, every media delivers results. When your message is wrong, no media delivers results.
2. Don’t be fooled by short-term results created through false urgency. Short-term results are not scalable or sustainable.
3. Advertising cannot be divorced from operations. If your advertising causes your customers to have expectations that your people fail to deliver, your ads will be working against you.
4. Sales managers love to say to ad writers, “The job of advertising is to generate sales opportunities. If you double our sales opportunities, we will make twice as many sales. Show me what you can do.” These sales managers need to grasp the fact that when a customer has an experience that is different from what the ads promised, that customer will be dissatisfied and resentful, even if you made the sale.

Take a snapshot of that customer for your photo album because you will probably never see them again.

1. When a customer is annoyed at you and resentful toward you, they tell an average of 28 people. And that statistic is from 25 years ago, prior to the advent of social media. I suspect the damage is bigger and happens faster today.
2. Your business is doomed the moment your customers begin to ask, “When does this go on sale?” (If you are too young to have ever asked that question, this is because the huge companies whose salespeople were asked that question every day have mostly disappeared. If you have 3 or more “percentage discount” sales every year, it will take only a few years for your customers to realize that they will be able buy it cheaper if they wait until your next sale. This is when your “sales event” spikes get taller and taller on the sales graph, and the valleys in-between get wider and deeper. “Percentage-off” sales are addictive and destructive. If you don’t believe me, just ask anyone from one of the dozens of big discounting giants of yesterday who have filed for bankruptcy and disappeared from the earth.
3. I have never seen a business fail because they were “reaching the wrong people.”

I have seen hundreds of businesses fail because they did not understand the Purpose of Advertising.

The Purpose of Advertising is to:

1. Differentiate yourself from your competitors
2. Become the company that people think of first, and feel the best about.
3. Sell products and services

When you work all day, every day, with business owners, and follow the most credible research, those are the things you will learn.

Roy H. Williams

Most people have heard of the “Great Wealth Transfer” — the trillions of dollars that will pass from aging Baby Boomers to their children.

What is seldom discussed is the “Great Stuff Transfer”: All the personal and business possessions — including collectibles, furniture, vehicles, and sentimental keepsakes — that younger generations stand to inherit.

Mindy Godding is an award-winning organizer and down-sizer who understands the rewards and the pitfalls of deciding what to do with possessions accumulated over a lifetime.

Listen in as she explains to roving reporter Rotbart how this transition requires more than just deciding what to keep, donate, or discard. It begins with understanding the emotional and psychological attachments that make letting go so difficult. This is the episode you need to hear at MondayMorningRadio.com