Today we’re going to do something fun. Are you ready?

(Press the PLAY button to hear the audio version of today’s memo.)

I will tell you how to advertise if you will tell me the nature of your business.

Advertising can be broken into 6 major categories:

1. Business-to-Business (B2B)
2. Niche Marketing (Niche-S) with a short purchase cycle
3. Niche Marketing (Niche-L) with a long purchase cycle
4. Short Purchase Cycle (B2C-Short) Business-to-Consumer
5. Long Purchase Cycle (B2C-Long) Business-to-Consumer
6. Mixed Purchase Cycle (B2C-Mixed) Business-to-Consumer

Business to Business.

B2B: If you are in a business that sells to other businesses, tight targeting will be essential to your success, but you can easily identify the customers you need to target.

Their addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses are readily available and direct mail, phone calls and emails are cheap. If you have some extra dollars, you can place ads in the appropriate trade magazines and websites to elevate your brand.

Features, benefits, pricing, delivery, and payment terms are important elements within your message. How well your B2B ad campaign works will depend entirely on what you say.

It will depend on what you say.

Focus on saying the right things.

Now let’s talk about Niche Marketing with a Long Purchase Cycle.

Niche-L: If you sell a specialty product that appeals to an affinity group, social media is a powerful thing. A powerful thing.

Danny sells the most rare, weird, exotic, and inexplicable guns the world has ever known. Firearms collectors are an affinity group. Collectible firearms are a Niche Market with a long purchase cycle.

Danny will soon be producing a new daily short and posting it on YouTube 365 days a year. Each short video will be Danny showing you a different gun and telling you the story behind it. He is not going to shoot the gun. He is just going to tell you its story.

Danny doesn’t need to find gun collectors. Gun collectors will find him. YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine. Danny just needs to produce interesting content.

Brian Brushwood taught me that.

Would you like to have an invisible garage door like the one that Batman passes through to enter the Bat Cave?

Max can do that for you.

But invisible garage doors can only be installed in houses that have no masonry. Max needs to locate charming houses with wooden exteriors.

He can knock on their doors, leave a door-hanger, or mail them a glorious postcard. Max sells garage doors to a Niche Market with a long purchase cycle.

Do you sell an intangible Niche product with a long purchase cycle?

Are you a sales trainer, an ad writer, a nutritional expert, a motivational speaker, a psychic healer, an entertainer?

Build fame. Ride the tidal wave of fame. Fame leads to word-of-mouth. Be remarkable. Advertising is a tax you pay for not being remarkable.

Be remarkable.

Next week we’ll talk about Short Purchase Cycle Niche Marketing and B2C.

We’ll talk about B2C.

You and me.

Roy H. Williams

PS – When you have achieved a little bit of fame, make yourself easy to find by paying Google for the click whenever someone types your name into the search bar. But that’s not advertising. That’s just helping people find you when they are looking for you by name.

The...

When you understand how a person thinks, speaks, acts, and sees the world, you feel like you know that person.

This is true whether you have spent time with them, or if you have spent time with them through the magic of modern media.

Television, radio, and social media can be used to make sure that people know about you, or they can be used to make people feel like they know you.

I have written a 4-stanza poem from the perspective of 3 different personalities.

The story arc is the same for all 3 poems.

The 4-verse, 4 stanza structure is the same.

The rhyming conventions are very similar.

The only real difference is that these short poems reveal the hearts of 3 different people; their perspectives, their attitudes, their personalities.

My partner Gene Naftulyev directed the singers who turned these poems into blues songs.

You can read the song lyrics in the text of the Monday Morning Memo, or you can listen to the songs in the audio version of the memo.

These are the words to the first poem, and the song that was created from it:

The faster I go, the more I fall behind.

The map is fading in my mind.

Landmarks are not where they were before.

And cars don’t stop at red lights anymore.

I don’t want to be unkind and

Make innocent people feel maligned

But are all the gas pedals nailed to the floor?

Why don’t cars stop at red lights anymore?

Are these people colorblind?

Are their panties in a bind?

Are we fighting in a war?

Why don’t we stop at red lights anymore?

Is there an evil mastermind

Who is making us feel that we are falling behind?

Perhaps we can dangle him in an intersection

And see if he gets a new sense of direction.

© Roy H. Williams
Oct. 18, 2025

The singer of this song seems to be lamenting the loss of leisure. We perceive that he is troubled by the spiraling tyranny of the merely urgent. He doesn’t want to be unkind. His questions about the red-light runners being “colorblind,” or “having their panties in a bind” reveals a comedic wit. We sympathize with him. We agree with him. We like him.

Now let’s tell that same story two more times using exactly the same structure, rhyming scheme, and storytelling devices. The only difference between that first poem and the next two poems will be the differing perspectives of the storytellers.

I do not pretend to be a counselor-at-law,

Or a judge, or a jury from Arkansas,

But my heart does whisper this probing question:

“When did people stop stopping at intersections?”

We heard the words of Moses and foresaw

That we would need to be a nation of Laws.

But Moses did not give us “The 10 Suggestions.”

So why did people stop stopping at intersections?

Do you have a tragic flaw?

Do you look good in-the-raw?

If you want resurrection,

You need to start stopping at intersections.

Do you want sex appeal that makes ice thaw?

Do you want people to look at you with awe?

Do you want to achieve absolute perfection?

Just hit your brakes at the next intersection.

© Roy H. Williams, Oct 20, 2025

That singer has a slightly more antagonistic attitude. His references to Moses and the Law reveal him to be more legalistic than the first singer. His additional comments about “counselor-at-law,” “nation of laws,” “resurrection” and “perfection” reveal the kind of black-and-white clarity that can result from a strict religious upbringing. We cannot be certain of these things, but we suspect them.

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 that painting for what it was. I’ve loved “Ozymandias” since the 9th grade.

You remember it, don’t you? Bryan Cranston read that famous poem in the final episode of “Breaking Bad.” The title of the episode was “Ozymandias,” and TV Guide picked it as “the best television episode of the 21st century.” It was also the only episode of a TV show ever to achieve a perfect 10-out-of-10 rating on IMDb with over 200,000 votes, putting it at the number one spot for the most highly rated television episode ever:

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 from the auction, I spent a delightful 90 minutes tracking down all the bits and pieces 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 its tomb at Thebes by an Italian adventurer and that it would soon be traveling 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 Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II.

Look at the poem as it appeared in newspaper on that day in 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 famous novel “Frankenstein” that same 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...