My goal is to convince the auctioneer to let me sit in this car. It’s a 1961 Ferrari GT Drogo that will be auctioned September 26 in Berlin. The bidding will start north of half a million dollars and there’s no telling where it will end. Did you know you could buy a Ferrari 250 GTO for around […]

Jeff Sylvestre, consort and sidekick to superstar Queen Trish, saw this and thought you should see it, too.  Accidental Magic, baby, Accidental Magic. Or possibly very good Photoshop, you can never be sure.

Handstand, by Jürgen Schadeberg, is one of those photographs which are dedicated entirely to the present moment, but also transcend that moment with the sheer force of their symbolism. A young man is balancing dangerously on the balustrade of Hamburg’s “Michel” church tower, slick with rain, and below him is a sea of houses with wartime […]

How Connectivity Has Changed Us If your sales lead is one hour old, you’re about to make a cold call. In other words, you don’t really have a sales lead anymore. In fact, if that sales lead was generated online, your conversion rate declined by 60 percent at the end of 5 short minutes. One […]

Consciousness is a raft that floats on the depths of the unconscious like Huckleberry Finn on the Mississippi.

This is about 4 years old and 172,000,000 people have seen it and maybe one of them is you but I think it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s a minute and 21 seconds plus a 15-second ad for Chili’s that YouTube is going to make you watch, but […]

Three towers with an outdoor kitchen overlook a magnificent valley below. These towers mean 24 students can stay on campus instead of the current 18. We hope to build these next year. Hope. That’s the operative word.  

Cognoscenti Michael Staires felt this might be worth a look and I agreed with him and rose to the occasion. It won the award in 2013 for Best Irish Whiskey under $50 but you have to get it directly from the distillery in Ireland. There’s not a bottle of it for sale anywhere in North America. […]

Regardless of what you might think, this is NOT a country song.

You said you liked “Biloxi” last week, so this week I’m sharing some other songs which are sharply underrated, (if YouTube viewings are any indication.) This video begins with some very interesting trivia.

The BeagleSword pushed you back into your seat as you climb. Wow. You can see forever from up here And the rabbit hole was colorful. Heads up! Next week the wizard starts a 2 or 3-part series called Living for Real.

In What Direction Adventure? Part Two of Living for Real You can choose a dragon or you can wait until a dragon chooses you, but every happy person fights one. Our dragons give us purpose. Our dragons give us adventure. The problem with adventure is that we seldom realize how much fun we’re having until […]

The publisher of the Wizard of Ads trilogy – along with dozens of other business bestsellers – Ray Bard of Bard Press, thought we might want to see this. He was right. “A retired professor of business, education, political science, sociology, and psychology at Stanford University — not to mention the author of six books of […]

Daniel and Halle Whittington were in Arkansas recently. Standing in a gravel parking lot in front of a small convenience store in the middle of nowhere stood an old man chewing tobacco and grinding the toe of his work boot in the dirt. As he waited outside for Halle to buy the things they needed, Daniel said to the old man, […]

Words create reality for Intuitives. Reality creates reality for Sensing types. (Explaining the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator)

Brother Jones sent a fascinating New York Times article to us that made the wizard smile because it proved something that he’s been saying for years. You know how online marketers like to position broadcast media as “interruption marketing” and “push marketing” while they call online media “permission marketing” and “pull marketing”? The wizard has said from the beginning that […]

Want a Big Diamond? I know the location of the largest diamond ever discovered. It’s yours if you want it. All you have to do is go pick it up. The biggest diamond ever found is located in Serpens Cauda, a constellation in the Milky Way galaxy, where it is orbiting a pulsar star called PSR JI719-1438. […]

At a concert in Nuremberg in October, 1988, Leonard Cohen introduced a song that was born in a Montreal bookstore when Cohen was 15 years old: It was about 300 years ago today that I stumbled on a book by a Spanish poet. A book that was to alter my life completely. You see I was destined to be […]

The Unexamined Life Part One of Living for Real Dean Rotbart once told me that a person can do well without doing good. It took me a beat to grasp his meaning, but then it hit me and I’ve never forgotten it. “Doing well” is financial. It’s about you. “Doing good” is personal. It’s about […]

How does illumination affect color? Let’s take a look at how Walt Peregoy used his understanding of shapes and colors and illumination to visually enchant us in 101 Dalmations. The illustrations (below) on our 3 “Goals” pages were taken from the 2008 blog post of Oswald Iten of Switzerland. Notice how Peregoy’s “color treatment” of those shapes […]

How does illumination affect color? Let’s take a look at how Walt Peregoy used his understanding of shapes and colors and illumination to visually enchant us in 101 Dalmations. The illustrations (below) on our 3 “Goals” pages were taken from the 2008 blog post of Oswald Iten of Switzerland. Those shapes and illuminated areas are highlighted in the […]

The reason to integrate an occasional direct response offer into your longterm bonding campaign is this: It’s easier – and a lot cheaper – to get a customer to buy from you a second time than it is the first time. So let’s get that first visit behind us, okay? Let’s convince your customer to reach out to you and […]

This is the Woody Creek Tavern in Aspen, hangout of the late Hunter S. Thompson.  

How does illumination affect color? Let’s take a look at how Walt Peregoy used his understanding of shapes and colors and illumination to visually enchant us in 101 Dalmations. The illustrations (below) on our 3 “Goals” pages were taken from the 2008 blog post of Oswald Iten of Switzerland. Notice the shapes created by the illuminated areas […]

Fiction author Brad Whittington is the wizard’s age and his kids are the age of the wizard’s kids and sometimes I see him when I’m having lunch with the wizard and the princess at Cafe Malta. We always ask Brad to join us at our table. He usually does. Friday was one of those days. We […]

In that same story told by Johnny Depp he gives us a partial reveal: “…the front door bursts open and I literally saw sparks. Sparks!” We can’t think of any possible explanation for these sparks until we hear the end of his tale a bit later, “…and as he got closer I saw that he had a 3-foot cattle prod […]

Perhaps you didn’t see it at the bottom of the previous page – or perhaps you didn’t take time to look at it – but here’s that Johnny Depp video again. The reality hooks he gives us are the name of town (Aspen,) the name of the bar (Woody Creek Tavern) and the date (December […]

Some artists have a special feel for color, don’t you think? “Cervantes, the bold metal of thy lance shatters the crystal turrets of Romance; down falls the wreck in ruin most immense upon the dreary plains of common sense.” – Lewis Spence, Spain: Myths and Legends, p. 351 (1920)

Of Gumball Machines and Commercial Jets Business people are attracted to direct response ads because they want their advertising to function like a gumball machine. “You put in your money and you crank the handle and out come the results.” In theory, direct response marketing is tidy and scalable and predictable. “Put in a penny […]

Disney’s Walt Peregoy drew Don Quixote riding Rocinante across the surface of the deep… The purpose of any building or the meaning of any bronze statue on the Wizard Academy campus can be determined by its elevation. We travel upward to study and celebrate. We travel downward to find meaning and rest. Look for the waterlines. Life is a journey […]

This photo of a second Peregoy sketch is a little out of focus, but you get the idea: Quixote is trying to save himself from the monster emerging from his unconscious mind. How often do we – me and you – wrestle with torments that exist only in our minds?

The wizard bought these sketches from the estate of Walt Peregoy and he’s planning to print them in the upcoming guidebook, Secrets of the Wizard Academy Campus.  Johnny Depp became a good friend of Hunter S. Thompson. And then Hunter decided he didn’t want to be anyone’s friend anymore.

Identity Hooks Branding – bonding with a hero or a company or any other imaginary character – is merely an entangling of identity hooks. We connect because we are alike. But where do we gather these identity hooks on which hang our self-definitions? “The music we listen to may not define who we are. But […]

You should make it your goal to hang out at The Toad one Friday afternoon. You never know who’s going to be here.

Peregoy could do a lot of different stuff, couldn’t he?

Third from the left – in the white shirt – is Walt Peregoy in 1958. (Photo by Ray Aragon) Peregoy created the look and feel of several of the finest Disney films of all time, including 101 Dalmations, The Sword in the Stone and Jungle Book. He was also responsible for much of the look and feel […]

The original of this Peregoy sketch from 1952 is more than 2 feet wide. Notice the angel’s wings on one jouster, the demon bat-wings on the other. Also, which of them is controlling the lance in the foreground? Did you see how it goes through the horse’s neck? The late-night art of comic artists is always fascinating stuff. […]

 A Walt Peregoy original in the collection of Wizard Academy

After the Battle, Walt Peregoy

“Education is theoretical. Experience is practical. Battle scars are the marks of a warrior. Happiest are those moments when you rise from the ashes of bitter defeat to try again, smarter, wiser, unstoppable. Everyone is watching you. Smile at them. Show your teeth.” – Roy H. Williams, I’ve Come to Encourage You, May 12, 2014

The Wizard bought this one, too, of course.

All the Young Lions and My Sadly Comical Midlife Crisis I got some great news last week. A friend who read my Musings of an Old Ad Writer said, “You’re not old, you’re middle aged.” Woo-hoo! If he’s right, I’m going to live to be 114. During the years that I was, in fact, middle […]

The Dog Bark Park Inn is in Idaho.  Cognoscenti John Prusa – a true son of Frank – sent this to us with his highest recommendation.

Bonding – connection between customer and brand, the result of a shared identity hook. Identity Hooks – personal experiences and beliefs, hopes and fears, fascinations and flaws that make you who you are. Genesis Story – the backstory of the origin of a character or group, revealing their motives and providing insight into quirks and eccentricities. AdSpeak – anything the […]