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The Monday Morning Memo

The Wizard Academy tower sits on a plateau 900 feet above the city of Austin. The view from the stardeck is stunning.

When you attend our free public seminar on the afternoon of March 17, you will be in Tuscan Hall just 500 feet from the tower. If you have some extra time on campus, perhaps Dave Young will be willing to press the button that lifts you from the underground art gallery up to the stardeck so that you can look around.

This is what I will teach you in Tuscan Hall:

  1. How to create a magnetic personality for your brand. It’s easier than you think.
  1. How to use personification to breathe life into all your corporate communications, beginning with your advertising.
  1. How to use character banter and magical thinking to help customers understand that your company has beliefs, values, motives, can make choices, and that it has life.
  1. How to gather these techniques into an operating plan that will integrate this magnetic new personality into every touchpoint of your business.
  1. How to measure the trajectory and momentum of your rejuvenated brand.

You’re going to have a good time. I will include lots of examples of PowerSelling ads that have lifted people to new heights.

Q: PowerSelling. What is it?
A: 
PowerSelling is an advertising technique that makes your name the one people think of first – and feel the best about – when they need what you sell.

Q: Does it work for B2B? (Business to Business)
A: Not really. B2B requires tight targeting and significantly more logic than what is required to win the hearts of the public. [NOTE: If today’s memo feels different than the typical Monday Morning Memo, it is because this is probably the first example of B2B writing that you have ever seen me write. Are you noticing the additional logic? – RHW]

Q: Does it work for Direct Response offers?
A:
No. Direct Response offers are built almost entirely on features and benefits, the so-called “value proposition,” enhanced by an urgent call-to-action, usually with a final bit of “added value” if you “act now.”

Q: So what’s it good for?
A: 
PowerSelling is for products and services that have a long purchase cycle and a relatively high price tag; things like diamond engagement rings, legal services, medical services, and home services like plumbing, air conditioning, roofing, and electrical. PowerSelling is strictly B2C (Business to Consumer) and it almost always employs mass media; television or radio, sometimes with billboards added.

Q: Will there be recordings made, or perhaps a livestream?
A: 
Sorry, but no. The Wizards of Ads® have little desire to debate – or educate – a world full of traditional ad writers that have been trained on the tripe that is taught in college.*

You are going to learn the explosive techniques that can make your advertising lift off the launchpad with fire and smoke as you begin your journey to the stars. The acceleration of your rocket will grow to the point to where your cheeks are pulled back and your eyes become slits as the corners of your mouth touch your earlobes.

Or maybe you are just smiling.

If you are ready for the ride of your life, be in Austin on March 17th.

Roy H. Williams

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Random Quote:

“Jeffrey Eisenberg and I were looking though a pair of antique doors at Austin Auction Gallery when I saw a remarkable oil painting on the wall behind them and whispered in wonder, “Ozymandias.”

The auction catalog described the painting as, “Arabian horse and handler with Egyptian sphinx, signed lower right Maksymilian Novak-Zemplinski (Polish, b.1974), dated 2000.”

But I knew the painting for what it was. I’ve loved “Ozymandias” since the 9th grade. You remember it, don’t you?

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

When I returned home, I spent a delightful 90 minutes hunting down all the bits and peices of how that poem came to exist.

It was in 1817 that Percy Bysshe Shelley and his poet friend, Horace Smith read the news that the carved head of Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II had been removed from his tomb at Thebes by an Italian adventurer and that it would be travelling to Britain.

Shelly suggested to Smith that each of them should write a poem about it and title each of their poems “Ozymandias,” the Greek name for that particular Egyptian pharaoh.

Look at the poem as it appeared in newspaper on that of 1818, and you will see that Percy Bysshe Shelley signed it, “Glirastes.” He did it as an inside joke intended only for his wife, Mary Shelley, who, incidentally, published her most famous novel “Frankenstein” that year.

Mary often signed her letters to Percy as “your affectionate dormouse.” So Percy combined “Gliridae” (Latin for dormouse) with “Erastes” (Greek for lover) to create “Glirastes,” (meaning “lover of dormice.”)

So now you know how Google’s second-most-often-searched poem came to be published without anyone in London suspecting that it had been written on a bet with a friend by one of the most famous poets on earth who chose to sign it with a pseudonym as an inside joke to his wife.

Did you know that I became an ad writer only because it was impossible to support myself as a poet?

Now that you know that, you will not be surprised that Indy Beagle has collected Google’s Top 20 Poems for you to read in the rabbit hole. Indy also found the Horace Smith version of Ozymandias and added it at the end of the Google’s Top 20 list.

To enter the rabbit hole, all you have to do is click the image that appears at the top of today’s Monday Morning Memo. You’ll find this memo archived as “Looking Though Antique Doors,” the Monday Morning Memo for October 20th, 2025.

This is the Google Top 20 List:

  • “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost
  • “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley
  • “Sonnet 18” by William Shakespeare
  • “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe
  • “Do not go gentle into that good night” by Dylan Thomas
  • “She Walks in Beauty” by Lord Byron
  • “Because I could not stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson
  • “O Captain! My Captain!” by Walt Whitman
  • “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou
  • “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot
  • “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost
  • “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe
  • “If –” by Rudyard Kipling
  • “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley
  • “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth, “
  • “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats.
  • “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
  • “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll.
  • “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus
  • “The Song of Hiawatha” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Ciao for Niao,

Roy H. Williams”

- Looking Through a Pair of Antique Doors

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