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...

The advantage of being an old man is that you can remember the past. This gives you a different perspective on current events. But if that old man is foolish enough to share his thoughts, the average person will smile tolerantly and pat him on his head and tell him that he is just “a lovable old dinosaur who is out-of-touch and living in the past.”

Screw it. I’m going to go ahead say what I’m thinking.

A few years ago, Big Data was going to change the world. Big Data came and went.

Then we got excited about ideas that were “disruptive.” Slash-and-burn disruption by a bunch of young pirates was going to change everything.

The Blockchain was going to change everything. You couldn’t go anywhere without someone blathering about Crypto and NFT’s.

Now AI is going change everything. And it definitely will, for awhile.

Technology saves money by reducing labor costs, which is just a fancy way of saying that technology allows you to replace people with machines. Unemployment will increase, and Trump will blame Obama.

And so it goes.

I had an appointment in 1977 to meet with a loan officer at First National Bank in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, to borrow $1,000.

The greeter at the bank sat me in a chair in the waiting room. I was 19 years old.

Smart phones did not exist. My only option was to paw through the pile of old magazines on the coffee table in front of me. Can you believe that every one of those magazines was about banking? The banker puts his banking magazines on the coffee table in his lobby when he is finished reading them. And the dentist puts his dental magazines on the coffee table in his lobby. This is how the Business Titans of Smallville keep their costs under control.

And they do it for our convenience.

I began reading a magazine about banking and it catapulted my brain into a tumbling somersault from which I have never recovered. The feature article was about ATM’s, but it didn’t call them ATM’s. It referred to them as automated teller machines.

“The modern bank executive can now reduce his payroll significantly because these new automated teller machines work without pay 24 hours a day, and they never make mistakes.”

My eyes were jacked open so wide that I was unable to blink.

ATM’s were not invented for our convenience! They were invented so that banks could fire 60% of their bank tellers!

“These new tellers require no health insurance, no air-conditioned offices, no telephones, no sick days, and they take no vacations. Your customers will thank you for giving them the ability to make deposits and withdrawals 24 hours a day from a variety of convenient locations.”

The man I saw in my mind was the banker in the old Monopoly game by Parker Brothers. The way to win the game of Monopoly is to gobble up all the things that people cannot avoid, then take everything they own when an unlucky roll of the dice puts them at your mercy. It’s perfectly legal.

I played Monopoly when I was young, but I don’t play it anymore.

Parker Brothers began selling Monopoly in 1935. But that game’s origins trace back to an earlier version called “The Landlord’s Game” created by Elizabeth Magie. She crafted her game back in 1904, when Teddy Roosevelt was making his mark on history by curbing the excesses of the richest and most powerful men in America.

Google, Apple and Meta still play Monopoly. As do the insurance companies, the oil companies, the pharmaceutical companies and the medical corporations that control virtually all the doctors. But the version of Monopoly they play isn’t sold by Parker Brothers.

To win, all you have to do is gobble up the things that people cannot avoid, then take everything they own when an unlucky roll of the dice puts them at your mercy. It’s perfectly legal.

Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt are the Republicans on