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Effective Advertising Workshops Newsletter
Volume 2, issue 9
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Greetings!
Difficult times call for difficult decisions. 67% of advertising managers have been told to cut back. You know you need to reduce your expenditures as a reflection of decreasing sales. But where? How much? Your competition is (or is not) cutting back, what is the best course for your business? Now is a good time to consolidate. Write all of your advertising costs down. If you don't already know, find out immediately where you get the highest return on your investment and then cut out the weak producers. A good rule of thumb - don't diversify, don't spread the wealth, and forget "media mix". Start with one good venue to brand your business, reach a sufficient number of customers, reach them enough times so that your message begins to sink in, do this consistently and, as your business grows, add additional media. Hundreds of businesses all over the country are using our Effective Advertising Plan and growing their business. Let us know how we can help you.
In this newsletter:
- Warren Buffett
- The Wizard of Ads
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| 10 Ways to Get Rich |
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Warren Buffett's Secrets That Can Work For You
With an estimated fortune of $62 billion, Warren  Buffett is the richest man in the entire world. In 1962, when he began buying stock in Berkshire Hathaway, a share cost $7.50. Today, Buffett, 78, is Berkshire's chairman and CEO, and one share of the company's class A stock is worth close to $119,000. He credits his astonishing success to several key strategies -
Here are some of Buffett's money-making secrets - and how they could work for you.
1. Reinvest Your Profits. When you first make money, you may be tempted to spend it. Don't. Instead, reinvest the profits. Buffet learned this early on. In high school, he and a pal bought a pinball machine to put in a barber shop. With the money they earned, they bought more machines until they had eight in different shops. When the friends sold the venture, Buffett used the proceeds to buy stocks and to start another small business. By age 26, he'd amassed $174,000 - or $1.4 million in today's money. Even a small sum can turn into great wealth.
2. Be willing to be different. Don't base your decisions upon what everyone else is saying or doing. When Buffett began managing money in 1956 with $100,000 cobbled together from a handful of investors, he was dubbed an oddball. He worked in Omaha, not on Wall Street, and he refused to tell his partners where he was putting their money. People predicted that he'd fail, but when he closed his partnership 14 years later, it was worth more than $100 million. Instead of following the crowd, he looked for undervalued investments and ended up vastly beating the market average every single year. To Buffett, the average is just that - what everybody else is doing. To be above average, you need to measure yourself by what he calls the Inner Scorecard, judging yourself by your own standards and not the world's.
3. Never suck your thumb. Gather in advance any information you need to make a decision, and ask a friend or relative to make sure that you stick to a deadline. Buffett prides himself on swiftly making up his mind and acting on it. He calls any unnecessary sitting and thinking "thumb sucking". When people offer him a business or an investment, he says, "I won't talk unless they bring me a price." He gives them an answer on the spot.
4. Spell out the deal before you start. Your bargaining leverage is always greater before you begin a job - that's when you have something to offer that the other party wants. Buffett learned this lesson the hard way as a kid, when his grandfather Ernest hired him and a friend to dig out the family grocery store after a blizzard. The boys spent five hours shoveling until they could barely straighten out their frozen hands. Afterward, his grandfather gave the pair less than 90 cents to split. Buffett was horrified that he performed such backbreaking work only to earn pennies an hour. Always nail down the specifics of a deal in advance - even with your friends and relatives.
5. Watch small expenses. Buffett invests in businesses run by managers who obsess over the tiniest costs. He once acquired a company whose owner counted sheets in rolls of 500 - sheet toilet paper to see if he was being cheated (he was). He also admired a friend who painted only the side of his office building that faced the road. Exercising vigilance over every expense can make your profits - and your paycheck - go much further.
6. Limit what you borrow. Living on credit cards and loans won't make you rich. Buffett has never borrowed a significant amount - not to invest, not for a mortgage. He has gotten many heart rending letters from people who thought their borrowing was manageable but became overwhelmed by debt. His advice: Negotiate with creditors to pay what you can. Then, when you are debt - free, work on saving some money that you can use to invest.
7. Be persistent. With tenacity and ingenuity, you can win against a more established competitor. Buffett acquired the Nebraska Furniture Mart in 1983 because he like the way its founder, Rose Blumkin, did business. A Russian immigrant, she built the mart from a pawnshop to the largest furniture store in North America. Her strategy was to undersell the big shots, and she was a merciless negotiator. To Buffett, Rose embodied the unwavering courage that makes a winner out of an underdog.
8. Know when to quit. Once, when Buffett was a teen, he went to the racetrack. He bet on a race and lost. To recoup his funds, he bet on another race. He lost again, leaving him with close to nothing. He felt sick - he had squandered nearly a week's earnings. Buffett never repeated that mistake. Know when to walk away from a loss, and don't let anxiety fool you into trying again.
9. Assess the risks. In 1995, the employer of Buffett's son, Howie, was accused by the FBI of price-fixing. Buffett advised Howie to imagine the worst - and best-case scenarios if he stayed with the company. His son quickly realized that the risks of staying far outweighed any potential gains, and he quit the next day. Asking yourself "and then what?" can help you see all of the possible consequences when you're struggling to make a decision- and can guide you to the smartest choice.
10. Know what success really means. Despite his wealth, Buffett does not measure success by dollars. In 2006, he pledged to give away almost his entire fortune to charities, primarily the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He's adamant about not funding monuments to himself - no Warren Buffett buildings or malls. "I know people who have a lot of money," he says, "and they get testimonial dinners and hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that nobody in the world loves them. When you get to my age, you'll measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you. That's the ultimate test of how you've lived your life."
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| Roy Roy Williams is the "Wizard of Ads" Here's a short primer in Writing Ads 101 |
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How to write ads for Realtors, Used Cars, and free Puppies
Real estate is a business involving mountains of money. It's also a business in crisis. Put these together and it means ka-ching if you know how to make the phone ring for realtors.
Y
ou ought not be surprised that I know how to make phones ring.
What should surprise you is that I'm willing to tell you -for free.
Here's how to Make Magic in real estate:
1. Ask the realtor to show you an unusual house. More often than not, you'll want the house to be in the price range an average person could afford.
2. What makes this house quirky or weird or memorable isn't really important. What matters is that it has something distinctive about it.
3. Visit the house. Ponder the distinctive feature until it triggers the memory of a cultural icon.
4. Pull the icon into your ad copy. Radio works best, but this technique also works well in newspaper classifieds.
5. Always mention the price of the house.
6. Never mention the square footage, the number of bedrooms, or the address.
Let's say it's a white, frame house with a front porch, the kind that blanketed America during the first half of the 20th century. Older parts of every town are littered with these. The only thing this house has going for it is a giant tree in the front yard.
ANNOUNCER: Telling your friends how to find your new house will be easy.
FEMALE ON PHONE: "We're the house with the giant tree in the yard. You can't miss us."
ANNOUNCER: That big tree is begging for a tire swing. Will yours be the family that finally hangs one from that massive branch? Add a white picket fence and it's the house of Tom Sawyer. Here comes Becky Thatcher down the sidewalk. This is the house of a Norman Rockwell image. In a minute you'll see Andy and Barney cruise past in the patrol car. Aunt Bee is making a pie in the kitchen. This is a house for celebrating Thanksgiving and Christmas. A home to come home to. And just two hundred and nine thousand dollars makes it yours. Want to see it? Call Kathryn Nelson at 555-5555. She's not one of those big hair, lots-of-jewelry realtors. She's regular people.
REALTOR: Kathryn Nelson. Small hair, modest jewelry. 555-5555
Okay, that was easy. Let's try again. This time it's a house begging for a remodel. The appliances are a weird color, the sinks and bathtubs are pink porcelain and the bathroom tile is checkerboard black and white. The light fixtures are strange.
ANNOUNCER: Did you ever see Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's? Distinctive. Avant-garde. Sophisticated. Straight out of The New Yorker magazine. This is the house of Holly Golightly. Ridiculously retro. Definitely not for everyone. But absolutely adorable. And it has a driveway built for a sportscar. There's only one and this is it. Two hundred and twenty-nine thousand. And the shrubbery! I'm not even going to try to describe it. Listed by Harvey Rich Realtors, of course. Harvey Rich has all the interesting houses.
REALTOR: Boring houses are for boring people. Harvey Rich has interesting houses. And I'd love to show you this one. 555-5555 Harvey Rich.
Now let me make this clear: The goal is to make the phone ring. Whether or not the caller buys the advertised house is unimportant. The realtor just wants to meet folks who are thinking of moving. He or she wants a shot at listing their current home. If the respondent doesn't like the home you featured, the realtor will happily drive them to see some other ones.
NOTE: If you yield to temptation and add any of the typical "3 bedroom, two bath" real estate language, it'll kill response deader than a bag of hammers.
The Cognoscenti will recognize this technique as a variation of Being Perfectly Robert Frank:
1. Selected Details.
2. Interesting Angle.
3. What to Leave Out.
This is a Wizard of Ads signature technique. Consequently, it requires an advertiser bold enough to believe that every other realtor is doing it wrong. These people are harder to find than you think. Most advertisers secretly believe in conformity to the norm.
Jason Embleton is a Cognoscenti graduate of Wizard Academy and a used car dealer. Here are a couple of radio ads Jason wrote recently:
A Chevy pick-up with a sunroof. Four doors. And the back seat along with the wall behind it folds down to create the longest, roomiest cargo space of any vehicle on the road. Yours for $19,995. It's the Swiss Army knife of trucks. Jet black with dove grey leather. It's a weird, cool truck for a weird, cool person. See it for yourself at Embleton Auto, where the only pressure is in the tires.
Recognize the technique?
It's a car you'll want to drive forever. Just nineteen thousand, nine hundred dollars. A limited-edition Mini-Cooper with a factory-supercharged BMW engine. Black with a charcoal hood scoop and wrap-around racing stripes. Six speed transmission. It doesn't just look fast. It's a bullet-on-wheels that corners like a Formula One racecar. See it for yourself at Embleton Auto, where the only pressure is in the tires.
Keep in mind that no one is looking for a realtor. Everyone is looking for a house. And no one is looking for a used car dealer. Everyone is looking for a car.
My mother taught me this ad-writing technique when I was thirteen. My dog's accidental puppies were ready to wean when this ad appeared in the paper:
Authentic Precious Pearl puppies.
Free to good homes. 555-5555
"Hello?"
"What kind of dog is a Precious Pearl?"
After we got through telling them all about Pearl, our dog, every caller wanted a puppy.
The secret is knowing how to make the phone ring.
And now you know how. Roy H. Williams
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Our year has filled up. We are in Lexington this week, then Lincoln, NE; Orlando; Evansville, IN; and then Lafayette, LA. We hope to see you at one of our workshops. Please call or write in. We may be of help in helping you grow your business.
Sincerely,
Larry Kirby
Effective Advertising Workshops
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