Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads

Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads — summary

Two in the morning, in a police car's spotlight

You are twenty years old. Two in the morning. You and a friend are pacing back and forth in the dark along the wall of a hardware store.

This is not breaking in. You bet each other a cheeseburger that you could guess the length of the building, and now you are stepping it off. The problem is that the officer pulling into the parking lot at that exact moment has no way of knowing that.

Roy Williams knew exactly what the patrolman was seeing. Two young men, in the dead of night, circling a closed store. He also knew that "we're not doing anything, officer" sounds precisely the way every criminal sounds. So he did something else. He started talking, and he crammed in everything concrete he had. His own full name, Roy Hollister Williams. His friend's full name, Anthony Marc White. That his wife, Pennie, cannot stay awake past ten o'clock. That he used to work as an estimator for the Aqua-Tite Seamless Guttering Company on Mingo Road, which is where he learned to pace off distances.

The officer drove away.

Not because Roy performed his innocence more convincingly. Because a liar does not invent that many small, checkable details. The specifics were the evidence.

Roy H. Williams built an entire philosophy of advertising on that realization, and it made him one of the most sought-after advertising consultants in the United States. The book we are unpacking here was the number one business book in America in 1999. More than a hundred short essays, each barely two pages, each ending with a question aimed straight at you.