Roy H. Williams is known as The Wizard of Ads. So who better to listen to on the quandary of which media to put your ad budget into? In his Monday Morning Memo, he advises:

• Signage: Expensive signage at an intrusively visible location is often the cheapest advertising your money can buy. You're intrusively visible if the public sees you without looking for you. If you have an intrusive location, maximize your signage to be visible.


• Outdoor: Billboards reach more people for a dollar than any other media and are geographically targetable. But they become invisible after a few sightings in the same location, so you have to move them every 30 days.


• Direct Mail: You can target people geographically and, theoretically, psychographically as well, assuming the right member of the household sorts the mail. But most of it gets thrown away unopened.


• Radio: Sound is neurologically intrusive and radio feels like a friend. Radio is also a great equalizer for small companies, not requiring a big budget to be world class. The problem with radio is that most ads are written in a way that they can be easily ignored, and require repetition. But since most radio campaigns try to reach the largest number of people, the schedules deliver too little repetition.


• Television: It has the highest impact of any media, but unpredictable viewer habits make it difficult to reach the same viewer a second or third time within seven nights' sleep. If your message needs repetition, television is even trickier to schedule than radio.


• Newspaper: These need a visual trigger, a picture of your product. This trigger will attract the attention of customers consciously in the market for your product but those who aren't won't see it. "Consequently, newspaper ads often deliver immediately identifiable results, but these results fail to get better and better over time," he says.


• Yellow Pages: Like newspapers, the yellow pages reaches people consciously in the market. But while newspapers promote products, the yellow pages promote services. If your budget doesn't allow you to win customers before they need you (by becoming the name that immediately comes to mind through ads in media like radio, TV and signage), make sure you sing loud in the yellow pages.


• Magazines: It's perhaps the ultimate tool for psychographic targeting, but ads tends to be expensive and the frequency usually poor.


• Internet: This allows you to compete with the world but how do you draw traffic to your site? If your small business has the ability to drive traffic through mass media, a web site is often the perfect half step between your advertising and your store.

For some businesses, summer is the busiest time of the year. But for many of us, things at the office slow down. Here's how consultant Rhonda Abrams, in The Planning Shop Report, suggests making better use of the season:

• Call on hard-to-reach prospects. Summer is likely the slowest time of the year for people who said "get back to me when I'm not so busy."


• Have lunch -- or golf outings -- with good customers, building relationships while everyone is less frantic about time.


• Plan for the coming year, getting out ideas now, holding a planning session in August, and treating September as the starting gate for another year.


• Start setting your annual budget now.


• Catch up and clean up on a slow summer day. Upgrade your computer system, or learn a new software program.


• Meet with your accountant or lawyer to take care of loose ends and learn how to improve your business.


• Do something unusual. Take in a movie in mid-week, drive to the lake, or take your employees on an impromptu picnic.

Prima Donnas are often very good at their work and know it or have an overinflated opinion of their capabilities. Either way, they tend to be high-maintenance employees, who often have demands and conditions attached to their effort. The Prima Donna can't understand why others don't view him as unique or as special as he sees himself.

In The Winning At Work Newsletter, Ottawa consultant Shaun Belding says changing this employee's behaviour is a long shot, so focus on minimizing the impact he has on people around him. Try to have him working on his own as much as possible, and don't give in to demands. Add elements of teamwork and co-operation to his job description, addressing these elements at review time -- and whatever you do, avoid putting him in a leadership position.

• The best advice William Lauder, president and CEO of Estée Lauder Companies, ever got was from his first boss, who bellowed: "If you're not in control of your calendar, you're not in control." Every morning he scans his day's activities to make sure he isn't in meetings he doesn't have to be and isn't scheduled so tightly he is setting himself up for a mess -- with, for example, appointments two miles apart with only five minutes to travel between them.
  (Source: Harvard Business Review)


• Consultant Glenn Gow says it's more fun to get new customers but in a downturn better to focus on providing more value and getting more in return from current customers.
  (Source: MarketingProfs.com)


• Warm up for your brainstorming sessions just as you might stretch before a jog. Organizational psychologist Amantha Imber suggests choosing an impossible goal to tackle -- such as how to boost Paris Hilton's IQ by 100 by the end of the week, or how to raise $10 billion by dinner time -- and give yourself five minutes to come up with some inventive solutions.
  (Source: Get To The Point newsletter)


• Consultant Jeff Mowatt says the more you schmooze with a customer and they consider you a friend, the more they will want to pay the discounted "family rate." Remember your customers already have friends. What they want and are willing to pay for are professionals.
  (Source: Influence With Ease newsletter)


• Learn from Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer: When you have some data that needs to stand out in a PowerPoint presentation, make it a different colour from the rest on the list or circle it in red.
  (Source: Strung Out On Science Fiction web site)

This is one of the eternal questions in hiring -- or should be, except too many managers overlook it. Are you looking for someone who is the best person to handle a specific job today -- or someone who can handle that job well but also has the potential to adeptly handle a variety of other jobs in future, growing with your organization?

It's not always either-or. Sometimes the right person stands out as the best person for both time periods. But sometimes there is a clear tradeoff, even if it may go unrecognized because everyone is so focused on the job description for today they forget about tomorrow.

If you use a scoring system for evaluating candidates, what element of it recognizes this conflict? Do you have points for flexibility and ability to grow in and beyond the job? Ability to be a future manager? Ability to take on many different roles, filling in holes should other people take parental leave or depart?

Some jobs seem fixed. You have always had a bookkeeper and need a new one, for example. It requires certain skills. Why hire beyond?

That may be the right choice. But remember, people tire and burn out. They like to grow. Will the bookkeeper be able to grow in that position? If not, are you setting yourself up for the new recruit to burn out, or quit? And is that better than having the individual take their talent and knowledge of your operation into a new role, down the road, within your company? If so, are you really hiring for today -- or for tomorrow?

Look around at your staff and calculate how many of them are in the original jobs you hired them for. How many have shifted around, which is a measure of the fluidity of roles in your workplace? Ideally, of those who didn't shift around, how many do you wish could?

There is no absolute answer to this dilemma. Each hiring is different. But on balance, I'd suggest we're better off hiring for tomorrow than today -- and suspect that when faced with the choice, like most other organizations, we too often do the reverse, fixating on the job description and hiring for today.

In our practice, we often hear from people who are discouraged or frustrated by the difficulty of getting people to change their minds, embrace change or adopt new points of view. Often they are trying to reason someone out of something they weren't reasoned into.

The situation brings to mind a line in a television sketch we saw last month at a news museum in Washington. An interviewer pressing a subject for some hard details got this response: "Facts. I don't like facts. I don't trust facts. Facts can change. My opinion, on the other hand, never does!"

So often we try to use a mass of data to persuade an audience when the issue is anchored not in different understandings of the facts but by interpretation, world view or mental paradigm, by identity, values or emotions. On their own, an isolated volley of facts can't change those types of opinion.

8020Info offers counsel to help your organization design more effective communications strategies. We would be pleased to discuss your needs and welcome enquiries at (613) 542-8020, or by email at watercooler@8020info.com.