I’m standing on an island in New York Harbour, quietly gazing up at the torch of Lady Liberty, when my ears catch a distant rumble. The noise quickly becomes a rushing roar, and for an instant the pale blue sky above the Lady’s torch turns dark as six navy jets pass over her in tight formation. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen the Blue Angels. My thoughts turn immediately to Bennie.

Bennie is a printer who has taught his craft to several young people, then helped each one of them open his own little printing shop. Bennie remains a silent partner in each of the shops as he sells his young partners all their paper and printing supplies. Most people think Bennie is a printer, but in reality Bennie is a salesman.

Bennie is such a good salesman, in fact, that he has been sent to make an impossible sale. His employers need money desperately, but no-one is willing to loan it to them because everyone knows they are going under. Bennie’s mission is to secure the funding that will allow them to survive, an amount totaling several million dollars, and Bennie has nothing to offer as collateral. But Bennie has a plan.

Bennie wangles himself an invitation to a dinner party where movers and shakers will be gathered, but instead of smiling and handing his business card to each of the powerful men, Bennie slips into the room next door where all the men’s wives have gathered. Bennie smiles and listens and asks perceptive questions and is soon quite a favourite among the ladies, so it comes as no surprise when he is invited to party after party. And each time it is the same: speak with the women, avoid the men.

One night, the ladies say, “Bennie, tell us about yourself. Tell us about where you are from.” Soon they are spellbound as Bennie speaks from his heart about his employers and their lofty goals, hopes, dreams and beliefs. Within a few days, Bennie’s employers have the money they need.

As the Blue Angels pass over Lady Liberty, my mind turns to Bennie, because this is the statue that was sent as a gift to Bennie’s employers by the nice people who loaned them the money back in 1777. It was during America’s darkest hour that Benjamin Franklin arranged to borrow from France the money needed to continue the Revolutionary War. One hundred years later, the French congratulated Bennie’s employers on their success with a little gift called the Statue of Liberty.

This surprising and colourful tale forms one of the 101 short chapters in the book“Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads” by Roy H. Williams (Bard Press, Texas, 1999). It’s typical of the homely little stories in the book, some with a twist, all revealing a secret or a valuable marketing insight.

As the book’s cover note suggests, Mr Williams, Texan adman known as “the Wizard of Ads”, conjures up provocative observations on advertising, business and life, dealing with such topics as:

· How to find a champion to sell your ideas

· Why targeting your market can be a big mistake

· How to get customers to remember you

· Why bankers think backwards

· How to write miraculous ads

· Why the brain contains 100,000 new worlds

· Why being “out of style” can be profitable

· How to hire wisely and fire compassionately

· How success can send you to the poor house

· How to remember what’s really important in life

Along the way, the book draws on rich sources such as history, literature, science, art, poetry, philosophy and anatomy, to provide a stimulating read and some challenging viewpoints. Definitely worth the read.

We purchased our copy of “Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads” at Borders. If you can’t find it there or at other fine local bookstores, click to Amazon for the details.

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Richard Grammier of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a decorated hero of American space exploration; many NASA missions owe their success in part to his dedicated project management. His latest project, called Deep Impact, was extremely complex: its goal was to fire two space probes 83 million miles into space to intercept a comet – one probe to hit the comet hard, creating a deep impact (hence the name); the second probe to fly by the comet, observe the impact and collect science data to determine the chemical composition of the materials excavated by the impact.

Grammier described the challenge of this project as “shooting a flying bullet at another flying bullet, while having a third flying bullet observe the impact and collect science data.” It was no easy feat, to be sure.

Moreover, Grammier inherited a mess of a project. He summarized his management challenges in terms of the following four fundamental problems:

1. Rigorous processes either not understood or not followed.

2. Inability to perform a project validation and verification programme.

3. Incomplete or insufficient project process reporting.

4. Inadequate flight operations concept and contingency plans.

Marketers attending a conference at which Mr Grammier spoke were asked to consider whether they had faced these four problems in recent marketing campaigns. The answer was Yes, even for some of the best marketers in the world.

Now, you might be thinking that, for a project like Deep Impact, of courseextensive process and measurement need to be central to the way things are done. After all, there’s a lot of money at stake and a very narrow window to get it right; otherwise it might be years and years before another opportunity presents itself.

You know the old saying that half of your advertising is wasted (but you don’t know which half)? Well, turns out that only around 37% of your advertising is trash. Sadly, that does equate to quite a lot of money – US$112 billion out of a total annual adspend of around $300 billion.

That happy statistic (and the tale above) come from the recently-published treatise “What Sticks: Why Most Advertising Fails And How to Guarantee Yours Succeeds” by Rex Briggs and Greg Stuart. Here’s how these two cheer-germs introduce the topic:

“Marketing is failing. CEOs sense it; top marketers know it; and our research proves it. That’s a strong statement – but we can back it up, from our experience and our research.

“We’ve conducted extensive research over the past 5 years, with over 30 major marketers – blue-chip companies such as Ford, ESPN, Procter & Gamble, Colgate, Kraft Foods, VeriSign, Johnson & Johnson, Volkswagen and Philips, to name just a few. They hired us to measure the impact of more than $1 billion in advertising spending in a revolutionary new way that shone a light on some very serious problems & opportunities.”

“What Sticks” has as its goal to help marketing and advertising professionals understand and improve marketing productivity through the use of new approaches, new thinking, some science and quite a few ideas based on what they’ve learned from their research with leading marketing departments in Fortune 200 companies.

Along the way, they also show us how to apply a little rocket-science thinking to marketing, inspired by the way that Richard Grammier addressed his four problems on the Deep Impact project:

1. First, Richard ensured that his team understood and was working with the proper process. The authors outline a marketing equivalent, a Communications Optimization Process, which (as with NASA) can make the difference between success and failure.

2. Next, Grammier and his team fixed the inability to perform adequate validation and verification tests. For marketers, this translates to testing different consumer motivations or alternative advertising messages to see which works better, or testing different consumer targeting strategies or different media mixes.

3. As with Deep Impact, marketing needs to fix its measurement and data reporting in order to provide a clear overall picture of the success of individual marketing elements.

4. And finally, Grammier addressed the inadequate flight operations concept and contingency plans in the same way that marketers will need to follow: develop a clear definition of success and what actions to take if certain elements of the campaign are off base (scenario planning).

If you can’t find it in your local bookstore, you can order “What Sticks” by following this link to Amazon.

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