Love as violence

R.D. Laing was an unconventional psychologist. One of the thing’s he talked about was ‘love as violence’.

That is what we do to our children. Because we want what’s best for them, we go beyond simply loving them. We equip them to survive in the world. To us it looks like love.

Looked at from another side, it’s actually damage. One instance he gave concerned Indian beggars. India was a very poor country. Millions were starving to death.

So, when a beggar had a child, she had to consider how it would survive. Because nearly everyone in India lived in poverty, no one gave money to beggars. Not unless they had a seriously good reason to beg.

An obvious, and major, disability that prevented them working. Otherwise, they’d definitely starve. That was the world of the beggar.

So, if a child was born without a deformity, it was a serious problem. If you really loved your child, you gave them what they needed to survive. A withered arm or leg, a crushed foot, or blindness. That way they should be able to make a living as a beggar.

This is love as violence. How the world appears depends on where we see it from. Because that’s the only world we know. R.D.Laing said that, in the West, we do the same thing to our children. But we do it mentally.

We couldn’t see a healthy, fully-formed mind as a possibility. No more than the Indian beggars could recognise a healthy, full-formed body.

In their world, they see a deformed body as suited to survival. In our world, we see a deformed mind as suited to survival. So we train and shape our children from the moment they’re born.

We send them to schools to learn to do everything exactly as we did. Exactly as everyone else does. We break and shape that fully-formed, healthy mind until it fits our preconception.

Until it’s suited to survive. We commit love as violence just as the beggar does.

This is R.D.laing’s view of what we do to our children. And yet what choice do we have? We can’t know any world outside what we know.

So what do we do? I don’t have the answer.

But I do have the question. And that’s a good start point. To do what we think is right, while being able to hold the possibility that it may be wrong.

Not to go on auto-pilot. Not to knee-jerk into the fastest possible answer. But to constantly be in the enquiry.

Aristotle said: “It is the mark of the educated mind that it can entertain a thought without accepting it.”

Now for most people that’s a big jump. To be confident enough to say, “I haven’t made my mind up yet.” We are taught that uncertainty is weakness. We have to have an instant answer at all times. One side is right, the other is wrong. But doesn’t this just show an inability to think?

Alfred North Whitehead said, "The problem with the world is that the ignorant are arrogant and cocksure, while the intelligent are full of doubt."

Instant certainty is often just football-supporter mentality. “Our team’s great. Your team’s ***.” Ignoring any evidence to the contrary is a matter of pride.

Unthinking allegiance proves you’re a true supporter. Why is that something to aspire to?

Where an ability to entertain more than one thought is seen as weakness?
 
Jeremy Sinclair’s favourite quote is from Socrates. "The more I know, the more I know I know nothing."

Personally, my favourite quote is from Lao Tzu.

“The wise man knows he doesn’t know. The fool doesn’t know he doesn’t know.”

Having immediate certainty on any problem doesn’t prove someone has an open mind. In fact it proves the opposite. It proves they approach every problem with an open mouth.

What use is advertising?

Akio Morita was the founder of Sony. Apparently how he got started was that, after the war, he bought several dozen wire-recorders from the US army.

These were an early form of tape recorder. When he bought them he didn’t know what he was going to do with them.

He knew the possibilities of this new technology excited him. The trouble was, there was no demand for it.

Being unable to record sound and instantly play it back was not a problem that needed solving. At least not for the average person.

Before Akio Morita could satisfy a demand, he needed to create one. So he wrote a small pamphlet about the uses and possibilities of a wire recorder. And he distributed it to schools in the Tokyo area.

Pretty soon the schools were clamouring to buy his wire recorders. He sold out, and that was the start of Sony.

Years later he saw the possibilities in transistors. Until that point, radios and TVs had used big old-fashioned ‘valves’.

These looked like light bulbs. They were about the same size and just as fragile.

Akio Morita realised that by using transistors instead, he could make technology smaller and tougher. In fact, truly portable for the first time.

One of his first uses of this was a tiny radio. At least it was tiny by the standards of the day.

It was about six inches long, four inches wide, and an inch deep. The problem was the demand for a portable radio didn’t exist.

So, before he could satisfy a demand, Morita knew he needed to create one.

He told his salesman they should demonstrate how amazing the radio was by popping it into their shirt pocket. The problem was it didn’t fit.

So Morita had hundreds of shirts made with slightly oversize pockets. He issued these for each of his salesmen to use when demonstrating the radio.

Sony created the market for tiny portable radios.

Years later his research and development people came up with a tiny tape cassette player that gave great sound. But it had no speakers. And it couldn’t record.

The Sony marketing department said the product wouldn’t sell. No one was asking for a cassette player that didn’t record and only worked with headphones.

Akio Morita knew, before he could satisfy a demand, he had to create one. So before he launched the product, he gave it away to opinion formers.

Professional musicians, recording studios, music journalists, composers. They all talked, and wrote, about the fantastic quality of the sound. Pretty soon the public were clamouring to buy it.

That was the Sony Walkman.

But before Akio Morita created the supply, the demand didn’t exist.

Adam Morgan wrote the book “Eating The Big Fish” which launched the concept of ‘challenger brands’.

Adam was telling me about an experiment in Canada. A company wasn’t sure about the value of its advertising. So, to see what would happen, they only advertised in half the country.

Sales didn’t seem to go up, so they stopped advertising.

Instead they did a coupon drop over the entire country. But only half the country used the coupons. Guess which half.

If the demand doesn’t exist, you can’t satisfy it.

Henry Ford said, “Before the automobile existed, if I’d asked people what they wanted, they’d have said faster horses.”

People aren’t visionaries. They can’t know they want something that doesn’t exist.

Sometimes you have to create the demand before you can satisfy it.

That’s called advertising. Creating a demand.

Akio Morita said, “The greatest assistance I had in growing my company was the total failure of nerve on the part of western businessmen to make a move without research.”

Marshall McLuhan put it differently. He said, “Running a business based only on research, is like driving a car by looking in the rear-view mirror.”

Why art schools shouldn't become universities

At my daughter’s school, the deputy head master asked her what she wanted to study at A level. She said she wanted to take Art, and Design-Technology, and Drama.

He said, “Ah yes, all the loser subjects.” That’s the view of the educational establishment.

Apparently, people who are going to be successful go to university. The losers go to art school.

I love that. Art schools are the best-kept secret in education.

People who haven’t been to art school think all you study is painting and sculpture. People who have been, know you study creativity. In all its aspects.

True, some people do actually end up doing painting or sculpture. But many more end up designing products, or packaging, or furniture, or fashion, or technology, or transport, or buildings, or making films, or theatre, or dance, or being photographers, or musicians, or actors.

Or even advertising.

Look around you. Unless it’s growing out of the ground, or walking or flying, there’s nothing you can see that wasn’t designed and manufactured. Everything around you was designed by someone who went to art school.

Here’s an amazing fact. Apparently, one in seven designers, worldwide, went to UK art schools.

In fact my wife came from Singapore to go to a UK art school. Because they don’t have art schools like ours in other countries.

Their art schools arec much more like universities. But our art schools have always been for rebels and rejects.

People who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, get on with formal education. People who were successful within the system ended up at University. Rebels and rejects went to art school.

See creativity isn’t about the academic process. You can promote creativity, you can encourage creativity, you can provoke creativity, you can excite creativity, you can channel creativity.

But you can’t learn it. You can’t read a book about it, memorise it, pass a test in it, and then be able to do it.

Creativity is exactly about surprise. And that’s about rebellion. The opposite of the academic process.

Now the bad news.

The government have turned all UK art schools into universities. This serves their purpose of being able to say that more people are going to university. But it ruins art schools. Because now you have to get a degree.

Which means you have to show you can perform academically. Which means you have to write essays and be able to conform. Which pretty much kills the creativity.

I know at least 5 people, two of them are account men, who did a foundation course at art school. Then they dropped out and went to university. Because they couldn’t handle the chaotic art school atmosphere. The fact that you’re left to your own devices.

No one marks your work, or gives you a gold star. You get hardly any feedback. You’re on your own competing against dozens of others.

These people had been successful at school, all the way up to A levels. But they couldn’t handle the lack of discipline, the lack of guidance, that passes for teaching at art school.

So they went back into the system, which was much more reassuring. For people like these universities serve a very useful purpose. They turn out great formal thinkers.

But universities are not art schools. Universities are about left-brain thinking.

Art schools are about right brain thinking.

One is about analysing and understanding why someone has done something. One is about actually doing it.

One is about reason. One is about the intuitive leap.

Both are valid. Both are needed.

We shouldn’t sacrifice one to the other. By turning art schools into universities we may have killed off one half of the equation.

We may have thrown away our advantage.

Footnotes

Recently, I was having lunch with David Abbott and he was telling me about Bill Bernbach. David had worked for Bernbach, and he’d met him many times. I’d hadn’t done either. So I loved to hear the stories.

I trained in New York, when advertising was split between Bernbach or Ogilvy. You either followed one or the other.

To the younger generation, Bernbach was a revolutionary, and Ogilvy a dinosaur. Ogilvy represented everything you see in Mad Men.

Typical Ogilvy ads featured white, middle-class families, in suburbia with 2.2 children, enjoying a martini, living perfect lives. Sort of like ‘Stepford Wives’. Selling you the dream you ought to want.

Typical Bernbach ads featured Jews, Irish, Black, Chinese, working-class, old or funny-looking people, living real lives.

Ogilvy ads were what all ads had been to that point: didactic. Bernbach ads were what no ads had been before: funny, charming, witty.

Ogilvy talked down to people. Bernbach talked up to people.

I said to David, it reminded me of a line by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. “All philosophy is basically footnotes to Plato.” That included Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, everyone.

Plato made the revolution, they just followed in his footsteps. And repeated and refined his lessons.

I said, for us that could read, “All advertising is basically footnotes to Bernbach,” David Abbott said, “That’s probably right.”

And remember he worked for, and knew, Ogilvy and Bernbach.

For my generation Bernbach was the man who invented good advertising. He made the revolution.

The best of everything since has been rediscovering and refining his lessons.

I was reminded of this recently at Tate Modern. There’s a huge new show of Pop Art. Everything from the sixties to the modern day.

And there you very clearly see, “All Modern Art is basically footnotes to Andy Warhol.”

I’d never really noticed before that all Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst have done is repeat and refine Warhol’s lessons.

Before Warhol, modern art was just men in sandals and beards. Men who plastered oil-paint onto the canvas with a trowel, and the messier the better.

The dollops of brown paint on Frank Auerbach’s pictures, for instance, are so thick the canvases have to be laid on their back when they’re not on show. Otherwise gravity will cause the massive weight of paint to droop down.

Art was visceral.

Warhol was the exact opposite. He used flat, glossy, acrylic paint. Plastic and fast drying.

Or spray paint and masking tape, for perfectly straight edges.

Warhol’s art became about manipulating images, not about artistic skill.

Previously, if you wanted silver, you juxtaposed black and white brush –strokes, so they shimmered between the canvas and the viewer. Warhol used a spray can of silver paint.

His art was about mass production, not one-offs. The glossier and slicker, the more facile and cynical, the better.

As Warhol said, “Business is the new art.”

He was the exact opposite of the precious artist. He glorified in being a media whore. He repositioned the entire art establishment as pretentious, elitist, dinosaurs.

Shock art, Hype art, Film art, Video art, Boredom as art. You name it, Warhol started it.

Then I looked at Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. Everything they did was in glossy modern materials. Shiny, pretty plastics in bright colours. Spotless and garish.

Everything they did was either shocking, or decorative, or ironically boring. The juxtaposition of style and content was repeating and refining Warhol.

I hadn’t appreciated just how influential he was until this exhibition. And that made me think about other areas.

Whatever you’re into, you can probably find someone who was the watershed. Someone who made a revolution that sucked everyone else along in its wake.

In music, I’d say it was The Beatles.

In football, Ron Greenwood.

In film, Sergei Eisenstein.

In science, Isaac Newton.

In fiction writing, Raymond Chandler.

In product design, Christopher Dresser.

In animation, Max Fleischer.

In computers, Steve Jobs.

In comedy, The Marx Brothers.

In art, Marcel Duchamp.

 
Try it yourself. Who are the people, for whom everyone else is just footnotes?

No one listens to technology

I was having dinner with some friends who are creative directors. We’d finished eating and we were just chatting.

While we were talking one of them got up to put some music on. He looked through the CDs, selected one, and put it on. Vivaldi I think it was.

Very pleasant in the background while we chatted. He sat down and started talking about the business.

He said, “No one wants to talk about advertising anymore. It has to be social-media. A creative presentation mustn’t start with, or even mention, advertising.Presentations have to be about Facebook, or MySpace, or Linkedin, or Twitter or iPhone apps.”

I said for me, it was like the Jack Nicholson speech in The Departed. “John Lennon said ‘I’m an artist: give me a fucking tuba and I’ll get you something out of it.” I said that was the difference between being creative and being a technician.

He asked me what I meant. I said, “Okay, before you just sat down, what did you do? You put on some Vivaldi. Now Vivaldi was originally played by live musicians with intruments. Then it was played on a wax cylinder.Then it was played on 78 rpm records.

"Then it was played on vinyl long-playing records.Then it was played on CDs. Now it’s played on MP3 players, memory sticks, and downloads. Whatever the next technology is, and the one after that, they’ll be playing Vivaldi on it.”

See, you don’t need to throw everything out and start only composing music that works on MP3 players. You don’t throw out all the old instruments and change to electronic ones.

You do great stuff with whatever is right. And if it’s great, it works anywhere and everywhere.

First comes the great ideas. Then comes the technology. When you get it the wrong way round you get a short-term gimmick.

Way back in the sixties they invented the electric organ. Everyone said it would revolutionise music and mean the death of old fashioned instruments. There was a mad rush to be the first to compose music especially for the new electronic instruments.

Anyone remember ‘Telstar’ by The Tornadoes? Thought not.

It came out around the same time as The Beatles. Remember them? Thought so. And yet John Lennon was using an old-fashioned acoustic guitar. Not even an electric one.

Because that’s the way round you do it. First you get the great idea then you pick the technology. You don’t pick the technology first.

As David Abbott said, “The crap that arrives at the speed of light is still crap when it gets there.”

Faris Yakob, the new media guru, says that one of the things that annoys him is when a client asks for some ‘viral’ media. He says viral isn’t a media.

Viral is what happens when a great idea catches on. Asking for ‘viral’ is like writing ‘have a great idea’ in the media box. The public are the viral part.

If it gets on their radar and into their consciousness, they’ll pass it on to friends. They’ll Facebook or email links to blogs, websites, YouTube or FlickR. But that’s them choosing to do it, not us buying space in it. At least not with money.

The only way you buy space in that medium is with great ideas. Just like Vivaldi did.

That’s what fascinates me about old-fashioned music halls. In those days there was no broadcast media. No radio or TV or record players.

The only place you could hear these people was live. They sang songs that got into the consciousness so much people left the theatre singing them. Then other people heard them singing and joined in. Then more and more people picked it up.

Pretty soon they were being sung by people who’d never heard the original. The words and music spread through the population propelled by a desire to join in. So they learned it and repeated it.

That’s viral, in the centuries before there was such a word. And all that was done without any broadcast media.

Imagine if we brought that sort of thinking, those sort of ideas, to all the new social-media options. Great ideas and new technology.

Never mind viral, you’d have a pandemic.

Is that all we do, sell stuff?

I was on the tube, on my way to the D&AD TV judging at Olympia. Olympia is the last stop on that branch of the District line.

Normally, when you get near the station, the train driver’s voice comes over the loud speaker. “The next stop is Olympia where this train terminates.”

Fair enough. It’s the basic information we need to know.

But this time the train driver did something different. He started singing over the loud speaker. To the tune of “I Did It My Way” by Frank Sinatra.

“And now, the end is near…… And now we reach…. Our destination. We’ve come from High Street Ken….. And passed through all…… Those other stations…..”

And, as he carried on singing, a strange thing happened. I looked around the carriage and people were smiling at each other. On the tube.

I’d never seen it before. And, as we got to Olympia, people started chatting to each other. When we left the train a few of us even stuck our head into the driver’s cab. Curious to see what he looked like. And I wanted to say thanks.

What he did started my day off really nicely. There was no reason to do it. He wouldn’t get paid anymore for it. None of us would buy more tube tickets because of it. There was no financial benefit. No material incentive.

So, in advertising terms, why do it? It couldn’t be justified. And we don’t do anything that can’t be justified, ultimately, in financial terms.

If a train driver wanted to sing on the tube he’d have to make a case that it would increase either brand loyalty, or propensity to purchase, or at least brand salience. But what if it doesn’t do any of those things? What if it’s just nice?

What if it just makes everyone feel better, with no financial benefit? Why isn’t that valid?

That train driver contributed to our lives that morning. He didn’t want anything from us. He was just having fun. And we had fun, listening to him have fun.

In fact that train driver cheered me up more than anything I saw at the D&AD TV judging. And that was all made by professionals. Professionals who would have needed consensus at every stage.

Consensus from the creatives, then from the account men, then from the planners, then from the clients, then from the TV authorities, and finally even from the production company, director, actors, and editor. You’re talking anywhere from a dozen to two-dozen people.

But the train driver didn’t have any of that. Imagine if he’d had to ask a dozen or more people in 6 different departments if he could sing about the last stop. It would have been at least a week before he got a decision.

“What’s the ROI on singing the destinations?” “Dunno, bit of fun?”

Yeah, right, that’d work. So it would never have happened. It can’t be justified. And yet, I tell you what, if you need a justification how about this.

I can’t remember 90% of the ads I saw during those 4 days of D&AD TV judging. And they were all done by extremely expensive groups of professionals from the most sophisticated advertising agencies in the world.

But I remembered, and talked about, and just wrote about, that train driver. And I remember the words of his song. Even though I only heard it once. And each time I repeat it, it’s another free OTS. And, as we all know, word-of-mouth is the best media you can get.

What would your clients pay for advertising like that?

Fear is good

Give it back to the people

In the first half of the 20th century, British music was just a poor copy of American music. First ragtime, then dixieland jazz, then swing, then modern jazz, then folk music, then rock and roll.

It got so bad that by the early sixties all British acts even had made-up names to sound more American. Vince Eager, Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, Adam Faith, Duffy Power. To give you an idea of just how bad it was, our two top rock stars were Cliff Richard and Tommy Steel. It was embarrassing.

Then The Beatles happened. Then The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Who, The Kinks, Led Zeppelin, Cream, Pink Floyd, you know the list. An entire explosion of people desperate not to be a bad copy of someone else.

They weren’t singing about high-school hops and drive-in movies. They were singing about Waterloo sunsets and semolina pilchards. They weren’t second-hand American, they were first-hand English.

By massively reacting against an existing convention, they created a whole new phenomena. Until that point, rock and roll had been about another country. But there’s a lot of power in rebellion. And there was a big feeling of “Give it back to the people”.

That’s how it always is in creative areas. When I started at art school, painting had become like an arts and craft movement. Muddy oil paints pushed around with a palette knife like Frank Auerbach. Or like Jackson Pollock, dribbling paint from a tin all over a canvas.

Pop Art was massive reaction against that. Slick, straight-edge designs in bright flat colours. Brillo boxes or soup cans like Andy Warhol. Jokey copies of comic books like Roy Lichtenstein. Huge fun rubber taps and egg-whisks like Claus Oldenberg. As far away as you could get from the tortured esoteric creations of blokes in beards and sandals.

Art had become too pompous, too intellectual. But there’s a lot of power in rebellion. And there was a big feeling of “Give it back to the people”.

That’s how it always is in creative areas. When I was at art school in New York, the advertising convention was slick salesmen in suits on Madison Avenue. Guys who created advertising that talked down to everyone. Selling a belief that we all aspired to being white, with 2.2 children, living in the suburbs, husband with a crew-cut wife with a pony-tail, and smiling all the time with perfect teeth. And our main problem in life should be what our neighbours thought about how white our clothes were.

Then Bernbach happened. The people in his ads were Jews, Blacks, Chinese, Irish, and Italian. He told you the truth about products instead of pretending things were perfect. Volkswagen was ugly but reliable. Avis was only number two, but they tried harder.

And an entire generation of young people wanted to do advertising that was honest and fun. Advertising had become patronising, manipulative, and dull. But there’s a lot of power in rebellion. And there was a big feeling of “Give it back to the people”.

That’s how it always is in creative areas. Maybe it’s that time again.