Roy H. Williams, the self-proclaimed Wizard of Ads, likes to tell advertising and media people that he hates radio. Can't stand it. Most of his friends hate radio, too.

That is how the Texas-based ad executive starts his hour-long presentation detailing why advertisers should devote most of their ad budget to radio buys. Radio sucks, it seems, but it works better than anything else out there.

Soon into Mr. Williams' pitch, a well-rehearsed mix of multi-level marketing sales presentation, standup comedy and university lecture, the reason for his disdainful devotion to radio becomes clear. Forget about the cheesy and cheap production values or sappy jingles; you are hitting unwary consumers with sound, the neutron bomb of the advertising arsenal.

"The invasive, intrusive and irresistible thing we call sound will always be the best way to reach the human creature," the president of Roy H. Williams Marketing Inc. told radio executives and ad types last week at the Canadian Music Week conference in Toronto.

"We spend every penny we touch buying either TV and radio -- and we don't buy TV for the pictures," he said. "It's because we get sound. It's the sound we're after."

He then calls up a number of diagrams of the human brain, which shows that sounds are processed and stored differently than pictures and moving images. Sounds directly hit the part of the brain governing action, while visual memories go into a passive section of the little grey cells. As Prof. Williams, the ad man rhymes off all the medical names for the parts of the brain, without pause, and has some pretty strong arguments.

You hate the Bee Gees but can't get one of their songs out of your head? That's sound's power on the brain. The average North American can sing along to an astounding 2,000 different songs, he said. None of us have tried to learn them.

"Well I don't listen to the radio! I never pay attention to it. I never hear those ads," he says in his best country yokel skeptic voice. "Oh, you hear them all right," states the professor and writer of the best-selling business book Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads.

One of the biggest advertising myths out there, Mr. Williams claims, is the cliche a picture is worth a thousand words.