Direct response ads are written to take the customer from Attention to Interest to Desire to Action in a single encounter.

Direct marketers have a product or a service to sell. They don’t have a brand to protect.

This is why ROAS is the perfect analytical tool for them.

ROAS is the acronym for Return On Ad Spend.

In other words, it is the Return On Investment of your ad budget.

You can:

1. measure lead generation with ROAS.
2. compare the effectiveness of media with ROAS.
3. track sales attribution with ROAS.

But you will never build a brand with ROAS.

In fact, the measurement of ROAS will always – without exception – lead to the disintegration of your brand.

Here’s why:

1. To produce an impressive result in a short period of time, your ad must contain a degree of urgency.
2. Urgency is not sustainable, nor is it scalable.
3. The longer you run urgent ads, the less well they work.

ROAS always looks great on paper for about a year, sometimes even 18 months.

But then the wheels fall off and you can never put those wheels back on again. Your brand will never be more than a shadow of its former self.

Consider this:

A successful Going Out of Business sale is simply a massive extraction of the stored value in a brand. This “stored value” is the reputation of the company and the trust of its customers.

These are variables that determine the success of every Going Out of Business Sale:

1. Has this company routinely advertised a Sale or offered a discount?
2. How highly do people esteem this brand?
3. How credible is the urgency contained in the ad copy?

ROAS always leads to short-term thinking because ROAS rewards ads that extract the largest amount of stored value from the brand.

Have you built a brand?

Do people feel a connection to your brand?

The day that you begin using ROAS to determine which ads work best, you will have launched a Going Out of Business Sale whether you intended to or not.

Roy H. Williams

One in every five American adults is the customer of a family that you have never heard of. Their company generates more than $32 billion in annual revenue. And the $17 trillion in customer accounts and investment funds it manages exceeds the gross domestic products of Germany, Japan, and India combined. Despite the enormous influence of Fidelity Investments, relatively little is known about the singular family behind the Boston-based multinational financial services giant.

Justin Baer, the deputy markets editor at The Wall Street Journal, reveals the dramatic three-generation saga of the fiercely private Johnson family in his new book. He also explains how they helped transform American investing.

Listen and be amazed as Baer shares with roving reporter Rotbart the behind-the-scenes story of Fidelity’s success. You will also gain insights from Fidelity’s rise in leadership, their marketing, their innovation, and their succession planning. The story begins the moment you arrive at MondayMorningRadio.com

I promise that I will state plainly for you – in ten short words – the singular Rule of Success before you have finished reading this Monday Morning Memo.

Stay quiet and stay close. We are wandering into a dangerous area. To see the glittering truth of the Rule of Success, we must quietly sneak up on it.

The North Star never moves because it hovers directly above the axis of the earth. If you draw a line from the South Pole to the North Pole and then extend that line 323 light years into space, it will touch the North Star.

Your life’s goal is your guiding light, your North Star. This is why you are forever traveling northward as you pursue your dream.

But there is a limit to north. That limit is called the North Pole.

When you go beyond that limit, you are now headed in the opposite direction.

This is the bitter truth that has been tasted by every person who has achieved their life’s goal:

“You work your whole life to reach the summit. And when you get there, all the roads lead down.”

Like every rule, North and South are finite and achievable.

Like every principle, East and West are infinite and unachievable.

You can travel east forever and never reach the end of “east.”

“The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement. But the opposite of a profound truth is often another profound truth.”

Without intending to do so, Niels Bohr summarized in those two sentences the fundamental difference between a rule and a principle. The first sentence describes every rule. The second sentence describes every principle.

The person who turns a principle into a rule is a fool.

I call that person a fool only because their mind is not big enough to hold in stasis the contradictory tension that is at the heart of every profound truth.

Did it ever occur to you that helping people get what they want is the foundational principle behind every business on earth?

Do you want to be successful?

This the only Rule of Success:

“Find out what people want, then give it to them.”

Jesus taught us the eternal principle behind the Rule of Success when he said,

“Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Remove “Love” from that principle, and you will have a similar principle that says,

“It is always good to help people get what they want.”

But here is the “opposite truth” of that principle:

“It is always bad to help people get what they want when it would require injuring an innocent person.”

In other words, removing “love” wasn’t such a great idea.

People who worship at the altar of Ayn Rand always try to convince me that it is okay to damage naive, gullible, innocent people “because the only person that really matters is you, and you are not responsible for making other people happy. You are only responsible for making yourself happy.”

Interestingly, that is exactly what Jeffrey Epstein believed.

He died in prison for his belief, and his name has become a curse word.

Bernie Madoff was only pretending to help people get what they wanted. He was perceived as “successful” for as long as he was able to sustain his con.

Bernie likewise died in prison.

Sam Bankman-Fried was a young fool who pretended to be helping people while he was robbing them blind.

The courts took away the 11 billion dollars he stole. Then they locked him in a room the size of a walk-in closet where he will spend the next 25 years of his life.

Removing love is never a good idea.

– Roy H. Williams

Effective advertising is not about delivering information; it is about delivering persuasion.

Don’t tell your audience how to feel.

Make them feel.

Great ad writers are secret poets.

Poetry is not about making words rhyme. Poetry is about leading people to a realization.

Poetic ad writers open your eyes and cause you to realize.

They lead you to a conclusion, then let you discover it for yourself.

Great writers don’t tell you. They show you.

This poem will do that:

What of the watchman on the wall?

What says the watchman?

“It is 10pm, let the night begin.”

What says the watchman?

“It is 11 at night, everything is all right.”

What says the watchman?

“It is midnight, the bell has rung. Every song has been sung.”

What says the watchman?

“It it is 1am, I am all alone. I am all alone.”

What says the watchman?

“It is 2am, scrolling on my phone.”

What says the watchman?

What says the watchman?

What says the watchman?

What says the watchman?

The watchman watched his phone.

The enemy arrived.

The watchman is gone.

Don’t just deliver information. Deliver persuasion.

Open their eyes. Make them realize.

When they see what you see, they will do what you want them to.

Win the heart and the mind will follow.

The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided.

Roy H. Williams

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn helps executives, entrepreneurs, and leadership teams make smarter, more confident choices and avoid costly mistakes. As a Decision Science strategist, Cheryl developed the widely used AREA Method, a framework designed to help leaders challenge assumptions, reduce cognitive bias, and improve judgment in high-stakes situations.

In this week’s episode of Monday Morning Radio, Cheryl explains to roving reporter Rotbart that while “gut instinct” plays a valuable role in business, too many leaders rely on it entirely, rather than grounding their decisions in real-world testing, stakeholder input, rigorous analysis, and evidence. Listen and learn at MondayMorningRadio.com