There was a day when you found yourself in a strange situation and you did the best you could. Before you knew it, you were walking through it.

You noticed a patch of wildflowers.

You made a friend.

Darkness fell. You saw an eye rise into the sky and believed it to be the moon. But now you know it was the eye of God, watching to see what you would do.

With one of his eyes, he watches the world. With his other eye, he watches you.

You kept walking.

A ravine led to a stream and that stream led to a river.

That first river led to a much broader river.

Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn invited you onto their raft. You had an adventure.

And then you had your heart broken.

Got sick and recovered.

Had a stroke of luck. Stretched it as far as you could.

You closed your eyes as you clicked the heels of your ruby red slippers and said, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”

When you opened your eyes, you knew that home wasn’t there anymore. The sun had risen while you were away, and home had evaporated into that thin blanket of warm air that wraps our bountiful earth.

That was the day when you started looking forward and quit looking back

And that is how you came to be where you are.

The story that I have told you about yourself is the story of every successful business owner I have ever known.

One of my business partners sent me a text at 3:37 this morning. It was a long and fascinating story that she wrote several years ago.

This is how it begins.

“Tomorrow, I leave the trailer park for good. I can never come back. None of us can. So I’d like to reminisce a little with some of my favorite memories of the place that I’ve called home for so many years. They make me smile…”

The middle of her story is a delightful account of the all the crazy adventures she had with her companions on the log raft as it floated down the river of her youth. But it was the ending of her story that made it precious.

“The giant trees were the big-top under which we conducted our circus of crazy. Here we created our own reality, full of unforgettable characters and ghetto fabulous adventures. No one could touch us. We lived in the middle of town, but existed in our own world. No matter what happened “out there,” we could always come home, be ourselves, start a fire, and connect. We were safe. We were a family.

For years the echoes of our laughter have bounced off the old trees that have always shaded us. I like the think that the vibrations of our laughter are trapped inside the bark of those trees – that if you were to put your ear up to one of them, you could still hear the crackling of the fire and the cackling of our laughs.

It’s been one hell of a ride. I’m sad to leave, but I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Goodbye trailer park, hello world.”

Today my partner lives in a sun-drenched house with a beautiful garden that overlooks the ocean.

I’ve never been there, but I’ve seen the photos.

She is a remarkable ad writer.

Roy H. Williams

Icons represent ideas that are bigger than themselves.

Myths are stories that represent ideas that are bigger than themselves.

Archetypes are symbols of recognizable patterns of behavior.

Letters of the alphabet are symbols (graphemes) that represents sounds (phonemes,) just as notes on a sheet of music are symbols that represent sounds.

A role model is a personal icon, an archetype that you have chosen to emulate.

The human brain loves symbols and patterns. This is why we embrace icons, myths, and archetypes.

When we recognize a pattern that has been stored in our subconscious, we call it intuition. When we hear a pattern that has been repeated too many times, we call it a predictable cliché.

Icons, myths, and archetypes evolve with each new generation.

I was born in the 12th year of the 18-year Baby Boom generation that began exactly 9 months and 10 minutes after the end of World War II.

Marilyn Monroe was the iconic sex symbol. The Statue of Liberty, Yankee Stadium, Yellowstone, and Woodstock were America’s iconic places. Rolls Royce, Cadillac, Corvette, Camaro and Mustang were iconic cars. Tetris, Pong, and Pac-Man were iconic video games.

The mythic stories of Baby Boomers were mostly about combat. Sometimes we fought the Indians of the Old West. Sometimes we fought the Germans, or the Japanese. We fought the Establishment. We fought for justice. Or we fought just to stay alive.

And we always won.

Our definitive male archetype in these mythic stories was rugged, brave, independent, and honorable. John Wayne, Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood, Sean Connery.

Baby Boomer female archetypes were smart, pretty, and strong; Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Julie Andrews, Sophia Loren.

Lots of movies ended with a wedding.

These societal forces shaped the birth cohort known as the Baby Boomers.

Gen-X was shaped by an entirely different set of icons, myths, and archetypes.

Millennials had icons, myths, and archetypes that were all their own, as well.

The Gen-Z cohort believes it is their responsibility to straighten out everything that the Boomers and X-ers screwed up.

Gen-Alpha is determined to make their own decisions and decide for themselves what they want to do. They will be the vanguard of the next “Me” generation.

Fortunately, there are elemental beliefs that bind us all together.

It is upon those beliefs that successful customer-bonding ad campaigns are built. Openly name these beliefs and they lose their magic.

If you claim to possess them, no one will believe you.

EXAMPLES: Never claim to be honest. Just say something that only an honest person would say. Never claim to be a perfectionist. Just do something that only a perfectionist would do. Don’t tell people that you are an author or a podcaster. Just give them a copy of your book. Invite them to be on your podcast.

If you would win the hearts and minds of tomorrow’s customers, this is what you must do:

1. Imagine that you are standing face-to-face with three perfect customers and they are each looking into your eyes.
2. The first one says, “Talk is cheap. Don’t tell me what you believe. Show me.”
3. The second customer says, “Tell me a true story that lets me know who you really are, including the price that you pay for being you.”
4. Customer three says, “If you betray me after I have given you my trust, I will burn you down so hot that grass won’t grow for 100 years.”

Now you understand cancel culture. Frustration created it, and social media fuels it.

People are looking for someone who really is...

The weakness of our current version of AI is that it extracts its knowledge only from what we have taught it.

Things that are rarely done are difficult for AI to imitate.

AI has confidence in things that are repeated online ad infinitum.*

Predictable ads follow the orthodox guidelines taught in every college in America. AI can find countless examples of these ads online. This is why AI can write predictable ads that look, feel, sound and smell like all those other predictable ads.

Predictability is a thief that robs you in broad daylight.

If you want your ads to remarkably outperform the predictable ads written by AI; if you want your ads to be noticed and remembered; you must do what is rarely done.

1. Enter your subject from a new angle, a surprising angle, a different angle.
2. Write an opening line that makes no sense.
3. Cause that opening line to make perfect sense in less than 30 seconds.

This technique is known as Random Entry and almost no one ever uses it.

“I’m John Hayes and I’m talking today with GoGo Gecko.”

“I was a 10-year-old boy holding a flashlight for my father.”

“Mr. Jenkins?”

“Yes, Bobby.”

“How much should a hamster weigh?”

“There’s Elmer Fudd, Elmer’s Glue, and me, Elmer Zubiate.”

Random Entry is not orthodox. Random Entry is not predictable.

“What makes our company, our product, our service different from our competitors?”

If you ask yourself that question, you will come up with the same 3 or 4 opening lines that each of your competitors will come up with when they ask those same questions. Your ads, and their ads, will look, feel, sound and smell like ads.

When you begin in a predictable way, it is hard to be unpredictable.

AI ads feel like ads because AI cannot (1.) identify, (2.) justify, or (3.) rectify Random Entry.

1. Identify.
2. AI cannot find examples of what does not exist. But you can create it.
3. Justify.
4. AI cannot bridge a random opening line into an unrelated subject. But you can build that bridge.
5. Rectify.
6. AI cannot reconcile a random opening line so that it makes perfect sense. But you can create a metaphor out of thin air.

When a novel becomes a bestselling book that gets made into a movie, you can be certain that it was built upon a weird and unexpected – but highly engaging – opening line.

“Call me Ishmael.”

– Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

“Where’s Papa going with that axe?”

– E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

– Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

– George Orwell, 1984

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

– Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Choose any one of those opening lines and tell your favorite AI to write an ad for your business using EXACTLY that line as the opening line. If your AI is successful, it will be due to the fact that you gave it a series of extremely insightful prompts. (Probably based on some of the things you learned in this Monday Morning Memo.)

Srinivas Rao recently wrote, “Confessions of a Master Bullshit Artist, aka ChatGPT.”

You think I’m a genius. I’m not. I’m an overconfident parrot in a lab coat.

I don’t know anything, check anything...