New media is two words, not one

If you go on TED.com you’ll see Evan Williams, the guy who created Twitter, speaking about how he still isn’t sure what it’s going to end up being used for.

Sometimes the invention happens before there’s a need for it. Our minds work on a supply and demand basis. But technological innovation isn’t always like that.

There wasn’t any demand for Twitter. But he thought it was a great idea, and people like great ideas.

So he just thought he’d put it out there and see what people did with it.

The same was true of Akio Morita, founder of Sony.

In the 1970s, one of his engineers came up with a little tape-cassette player that gave fantastic sound.

But you couldn’t record on it, and it only played back over headphones.

Sony’s marketing department rejected it. They said there was no demand for such a thing.

Akio Morita overruled them, he said it provided such great sound, people would find a way to use it.

That became the Sony Walkman.

When Steve Jobs started Apple his vision was always to create a computer hardware company to rival IBM. He didn’t invent the personal computer.

Rank Xerox engineers did, at PARC. They invented the mouse, the scroll down menu, and WISYWIG (a screen where ‘What You See Is What You Get’). Everything you know today as the personal computer. But the board at Rank Xerox rejected it. The public weren’t asking for domestic computers, so why supply a demand that didn’t exist?

So Steve Jobs took everything Rank Xerox didn’t want and launched the 1984 MacIntosh.

He let the public tell him what they wanted to use a computer for.

When you make the invention you can’t always see what the world’s going to do with it. Marconi thought the purpose of wireless would be to bring Church services to people in remote areas.

He didn’t know it would be used for radio stations, because they didn’t exist then.

In the 1930s, the people who invented radar didn’t know they were inventing a means of detecting the unseen. They were trying to invent a Death Ray that could destroy enemy aircraft.

As a Death Ray the invention was a failure, because the ‘rays’ just kept bouncing back. And that became radar.

When something is first invented it’s just technology. Then it gets absorbed into people’s lives and changes what exists. It doesn’t replace it, it doesn’t mean the death of it, it changes it.

We add it to what we’ve got. Like everyone else, I go online at Amazon to buy books. But I don’t use Amazon to browse books. I use it to send books to friends, or order books I already know I want.

I don’t spend the lunch hour online at Amazon, browsing through their shelves like I do in Waterstones. I go to Amazon with an answer not a question.

The same with Ocado. My wife uses the website to deliver heavy, regular purchases. Bottled water, cleaning products, paper towels, bathroom tissue, cases of wine. But she doesn’t use it for food shopping.

She enjoys walking around Waitrose or the local deli. Seeing new things, smelling the aromas, maybe tasting something, getting ideas.

We can both get involved on a visceral level at the shops in a way we can’t onlne. So online is an addition to our lives, not an alternative.

You see ‘new media’ is two words. And although everyone falls in love with the first word, it’s just an adjective. The second word, the noun, is more important.It might be new, but it’s still media.

My son’s reading ’20,000 Leagues Under The Sea’ by Jules Verne on his iPhone every morning on the tube. He downloaded 20 classic books, including Kipling, Kafka, and Dickens, from iTunes for 60p.

So you see, you don’t have to junk everything existing just because something new happens. Great stuff still works.

That’s the difference between a good idea and a technique. If you’ve got a good idea it can go anywhere. But if it’s dependent on a particular media, and won’t work anywhere else. Then it’s not an idea it’s a technique. That hasn’t changed since cave painting.

A nudge beats nagging

Rory Sutherland is a brilliant speaker, a cross between Stephen Fry and Boris Johnson. Rory is President of the IPA.

His current passion is to encourage Behavioural Economics into wider use amongst ad agencies.

The problem is, no one outside the planning department is interested in Behavioural Economics. Or any other kind of economics come to that.

That’s just sounds like more complicated planning stuff we don’t need to know about. We’re too busy doing ads that people can understand. Ordinary people. People who read The Sun, not The Guardian.
So just give us something simple we can understand.

Okay.

Actually there’s another name for Behavioural Economics.

In creative terms it’s called Good Ideas.

Really clever thinking that we can use to do better ads. Ways that we can out think our competition. It’s encapsulated in a book called ‘Nudge’.

It’s about setting up the situation so that people choose to do what we want them to do.

Rather than nagging them into doing it. If you’re a creative, that’s clever thinking. If you’re a planner, that’s Behavioural Economics. Either way it’s what we should be doing.

Rory’s favourite example is Ataturk, the Turkish ruler. He wanted Turkey to become a modern, secular state. So he needed to move the people away from religious domination.

One outward sign of this would be to stop Moslem women wearing the veil. One way to do that would be to pass a law banning it. But that might elevate the veil into a symbol of religious freedom. Which might actually turn people who wore it into martyrs.

How could he get women to choose to stop wearing the veil?

Well he didn’t pass any laws about women and the veil.

Except, he made it compulsory for prostitutes to wear the veil.

Suddenly no respectable woman wanted to be seen wearing a veil. By her own choice. Edward de Bono, the father of lateral-thinking, had a similar idea.

When London was about to introduce parking meters, he said there was a better way.

Don’t have any meters, but change the law.

So that you had to leave your headlights on when you parked.

No one would leave their car very long with the battery draining.

Several hundred years ago, the Duke of Buckingham owned a lot of land to the west of London. It was just farmland, of low value. But his son found a way to drastically increase he value of the land. He sold a house in the middle of that land, very cheaply, to the king. That became Buckingham palace.

Of course London society wanted to live near royalty. In fact they’d pay a premium. So the value of the land skyrocketed.

In the 1950s the Betty Crocker Company invented a cake mix. It was so easy, all you had to do was just add water and bake. But it didn’t sell.

Marketing expert Ernest Dichter found housewives felt they weren’t looking after their family by just adding water. So he changed the instructions to include adding an egg.

The cake-mix didn’t really need it, but housewives felt more fulfilled. And Betty Crocker built an entire cake mix market.

In Africa they have a problem with fresh water. It’s so far underground they need pumps to raise it to the surface.

But how do they get the machinery, the petrol, the electricity, the money? A charity called Water-Aid didn’t use any of that.

They had roundabouts built where the pumps would be. Children came from miles around to play on the roundabouts.

They were the only playground leisure equipment they had.

The roundabouts turned pumps, which raised the water to giant storage containers.

So the children came to play, and carried clean water back home. Nature knows the value of a nudge, too.

There is a plant in Africa that puts out a sap, and a fragrance, elephants find irresistible.

The elephants strip the bark of the plant, chew it and swallow it. At the same time swallowing the seeds.

As the elephant moves around the countryside it defecates everywhere. Distributing the seeds, partially germinated and wrapped inside a ball of manure.

And another example of Rory’s. Speed cameras.

Have you ever been driving and seen ahead of you a sign light up saying PLEASE SLOW DOWN?

These polite little reminders cost less than a quarter of what a speed camera costs. Yet they are four times more successful in reducing speeding.

A nudge is a great way to get people to choose to do what you want them to do. Rather than trying to nag them into doing it. Like the creative department.

A lot more of them will choose to get involved if we explain that it’s a way to beat their competition. By clever thinking.

That’s something they’ll choose to do. Rather than nagging them into Behavioural Economics.

What's the currency to purchase attention?

Recently, there was a debate about whether I was using Twitter wrongly. I have around 1,600 followers, but I only follow about 30 people.

Some people said I should be following many more people, probably as many as followed me.

I think this kind of depends on where you fit on the Rogers Technology Adoption bell-curve.

Let’s assume we accept the basic premise of the bell curve: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards.

There’s a thin wedge at the front end called Innovators. These are the real uber-geeks, silicone valley types.

We don’t meet a lot of these out on the street in daylight hours. But, what we do meet a lot of is Planners who are Early Adopters.

These are people who love to be first into any new technology.

They will experiment and try it out. They want to get in first and be trailblazers. They become evangelists. Next comes the Early Majority.

This is a much bigger amount of people who have been persuaded that this technology is an improvement. They will get it eventually.

Not just because it’s new, but if it’s proved to outperform the existing technology.

Then comes a similarly large amount called the Late Majority. These are people who are resistant to change for the sake of change. They are happy with what they have, and don’t see any reason to upgrade.

Eventually they switch as it becomes obvious it isn’t a fad, it’s the way everything’s going. Finally a small wedge shape called Laggards.

These people distrust change for whatever reason. They expect everything they buy to last forever and fight a rearguard action against change.

The real debate about Twitter seemed to be about the different attitudes between Early Adopters and The Early Majority.

It seems to me that, with all new technology, Early Adopters are evangelists for change.

They’ve joined a small club of people who forge the revolution. They see themselves as the revolutionary-elite.

Consequently, as the people who discovered it and proselytized about it first, they obviously believe they know more about it.

I think this is the nub of the debate. As the new technology moves from Early Adopters to The Early Majority it moves beyond their control.

It assumes new possibilities that didn’t exist for them. Because the people coming into the market aren’t like them. So they use things in different ways to them.

For instance, one of the people I follow on Twitter is Amelia Torode from VCCP.

It’s not follow like stalking. I just like people who sometimes say funny or interesting things. Things I can use.

Amelia retweeted something from a friend of hers, when it was snowing.

“If I can get to Putney Train station why can’t the train? It’s bigger. And faster.”

I thought this was funny, so I clicked on the person who
said it: Tracey Follows.

To see if there was anything else funny there. Anything else I could use. While I was there I noticed another of Tracey’s tweets.

“Oh bugger, Dave Trott’s book is out of stock on Amazon. Huff....was looking forward to reading that this weekend….”

I thought that was a shame. So I put a copy in an envelope and sent it to her.

Then I thought, that’s Twitter working just like advertising. If you’re amusing, people are more likely to pay attention to what you say.

Then something is more likely to happen. For me, this is how Twitter works.

Just like advertising.  I can get 1,600 people to visit my blog by telling the people who follow me that I’ve written a new one.

So that’s what I do. But how do I get 1,600 people to follow me in the first place?

I figure I have to be either funny or informative. Either way, like advertising, I have to be useful in their lives or why would they follow me?

I’m not interested in what anyone had for breakfast.And I don’t think anyone else is interested in what I had.

I think people who are like me, the Early Majority or Late Majority, want stuff we can use. So I try to be either entertaining or informative. If I want to buy your attention I figure that’s the currency of purchase. Just like advertising.

However much the technology changes, people don’t change.

 No one wants to be bored.

Creatives don't understand selling

Mike Greenlees used to tell me he hated presenting ads with creatives in the room.

He said one of the worst to present ads with was David Abbott.

I asked him why.

David Abbott was one of the best creatives there’s been: intelligent, rational, charming, and fast.

Mike said, exactly, that was the problem.

The better the creative in fact, the worse it was to have them in the room.

Because they were good at doing ads.

So they thought the answer to everything was to do an ad.

Mike said he’d go to present some ads with David Abbott.

The client would naturally have some comments.

He’d be asking why the ad was a certain way and why couldn’t it be slightly different.

Mike would be in the middle of explaining why it had to be that way it was.

Then, behind him, he’d hear SQUEAKY SQUEAKY SQUEAK.

And, just as Mike had finished his argument about why the ad they’d presented was absolutely right, David Abbott would hold up a new ad he’d just drawn on a layout pad.

And he’d say, “How about this? This could work.”

And David had actually done a better ad, right there in front of the client.

Now from a creative’s view I’m thinking “Result”.

But Mike Greenlees said they could have sold the original ad if he’d waited.

And worse, from an account man’s view, it undermined anything Mike would tell the client about ads in the future.

So, when Mike would subsequently be arguing why the ad had to be the way it was, the client could say, “But David Abbott rewrites ads really fast, and they often turn out better.”

Mike said creatives knew a lot about making ads.

But they didn’t understand selling ads.

They thought everything could be solved by doing a new ad.

Because what creatives did was solve problems.

And that the best people were the fastest people.

That’s not surprising really.

In football, boxing, war, business, speed of response is often what wins.

The counter-attack, counter-punch, counter offer.

Turning the situation quickly to an advantage.

Nip any problems in the bud, before it can develop.

Or respond with a better answer to the new problem.

See that’s what good creatives do, solve problems.

The better the creative the quicker they solve it.

Spotting a creative way to solve a problem is nearly irresistible.

Solving a problem more creatively, and faster than anyone else.

Well that’s what we’re paid for isn’t it?

And, inside the creative department, that’s true.

But there’s another kind of creativity.

Account handling.

It’s not necessarily about winning an argument.

It’s about getting the result you want.

And that’s a lot more to do with feeling a situation than winning an argument.

That’s to do with empathy rather than logic.

Mike used to depend on what he called his “account man’s antennae”.

Being a creative and a bloke, I didn’t have this empathy.

All I had was straight logic, reasoning.

All I understood was words.

What someone said, not how they said it.

So, when I’d ask a client “Do you like this ad?”

And they’d say, “Well, ye-ee-es, sort of, I suppose.”

What I heard was “Yes” they like the ad.

Result.

But what Mike Greenlees heard was “No, not really” they didn’t like the ad.

Similarly, when selling an ad, a client might say “I’ve got a problem with this particular part here.”

So I’d say “We can fix that, how about if we did this….”

Whereas Mike would listen, empathise, let it sink in, talk about it, and see if that really was the problem.

Feel what the client actually meant instead of just what they said.

Maybe the bit I was responding to wasn’t even the real problem at all.

Maybe the client had another worry that they weren’t expressing.

Or maybe there wasn’t really a problem at all, and the client was just gradually talking themself into the ad.

Either way, what the account man didn’t need at that point was a creative constantly changing the ad.

This could distract the client.

It might make them feel we had no confidence in the ad.

It might make the creative process seem really easy and trivial.

See, as creatives, we see our audience as the people who are going to buy the product.

That’s all we care about.

We don’t see our audience as the client.

The person who’s got to buy the ad, and find the money to run it.

The person whose job may be riding on that ad.

But that’s the account man’s audience.

And that’s why Mike Greenlees didn’t like creatives in the room when he was doing his job.

Is football a brand or a product?

Last night I went to a live football game.I haven’t been to a live game since they put seats in the grounds. When I was young we used to go to West Ham when they were playing at home.

You had to get to the ground a couple of hours before the match if you wanted a decent view.

Otherwise you got stuck behind one of the pillars.

And because there were no seats they could just literally cram as many people in as possible.

By the time the game started it was like the tube in the rush hour.

You couldn’t move.

And if anyone at the back started shoving, everyone in front of them went down like a row of dominoes.

This also mean you couldn’t get out to go the toilet.

a) Because you couldn’t get through the crowd

b) Even if you could, you couldn’t get back.

And everyone had had several pints beforehand, and been standing around for a few hours.

So let’s just say you didn’t wear your best suit to a match.

But since then TV coverage has improved fantastically.

There are now dozens of cameras in the ground covering every single bit of action, everywhere.

So I stopped going to live football.

I get a much better view of the game on TV.

I see every goal from every angle.

I have an overhead view of play developing.

I don’t miss a thing.

You’re not standing in the freezing cold for hours on end.

It’s warm and comfortable, and you can get a beer when you want.

This is definitely the superior way to watch football.

But a friend of mine, Neil Bowler, insisted I go to Arsenal with him.

And it was an eye opener.

Not the football, I was right about that.

You still don’t see much of the game from the stands.

The proof of this is that, whenever there’s a shot on goal, everyone turns round and watches the replay on one of the massive screens.

So the actual football itself is still better watched on TV.

But what I hadn’t allowed for is the football itself is only part of the experience.

The main reason to go to a live game is everything else that goes on around the football.

For a start, you don’t have to get to the ground 2 hours early to get a decent view.

You have a numbered seat, like the theatre.

Even if you get there just as the game starts you know you’ve got a decent view.

Like the theatre, you can get up at anytime and go out, and come back, and your seat’s still there.

And, because it’s a season ticket, you get to know the people around you.

So there’s a lot of camaraderie about your mutual support of the club.

Then, after the match everyone goes to the pub and discusses the game, the team, the opposition.

Previous games, other teams, other matches.

And, all the while, there’s a replay of the game you just watched on a giant screen in the pub, for everyone to talk about.

I think the part in the pub afterwards is the best part of the whole experience.

And the lesson for me was the difference between product and brand, right brain and left brain, emotion and logic.

If we separate out the product, the actual football, then there’s no debate, you actually see more, better on TV at home.

So that’s the product, the left brain logic.

But that’s only part of the experience.

The visceral experience, that can’t happen on your own at home with a TV set.

For that you need other people, shouting, laughing, getting angry, slapping each other on the back.

You need to soak up the atmosphere, it’s about sharing the experience.

It’s emotional, not rational.

In the build-up walking to the stadium, the expectation before the game, the shared tension in the stadium, the massive release when your team scores, going to a pub full of people exactly like you, afterwards.

Belonging.

I think it’s all about context.

Football on TV is pure product.

Live football is all about brand.

Creativity v Money

In World War 2, my Uncle Harry was in the 8^th Army, the Desert Rats.

They were fighting the Germans in North Africa.

In typical British army style, their equipment was crap.

Everything was left over from the First World War.

But they were fighting a modern, well-equipped, efficient army.

The Afrika Corps.

Uncle Harry said one of the worst things was the way the British Army carried its water and petrol.

They used flimsy containers that were pretty much just big tins.

Rattling around all over the desert caused them to leak or burst.

The Germans meanwhile had better equipment all round.

Uncle Harry said he was particularly jealous of the Germans’ water and petrol containers.

These were so tough you could stand a lorry on them and they wouldn’t break.

So the British soldiers did what they’ve always done best.

They improvised.

They stole the cans off the Germans and used them instead.

Eventually the British army learned to copy the German design.

And, even today, these containers are still called Jerry Cans.

Isn’t that what creativity’s about?

It’s about improvising, using your brain.

Use whatever you can, from wherever you can.

It’s not just about spending money.

Anyone can win when they’ve got the best of everything and more of it.

But the real buzz is winning when you haven’t.

Lack of money often forces us to be creative.

Brian May, from Queen, loved the unique sound of his original guitar.

So, even today, he has expensive replicas made.

The original guitar was made by his dad, in his shed.

The body came from an old wooden mantelpiece.

The tremolo arm came from a bicycle saddlebag carrier.

The knob on the end from a knitting needle.

And the springs were valves from an old motorbike.

He had no money so he was forced to be creative.

Now he uses money to try to replicate that original creativity.

One of the people that influenced John Lennon and Paul McCartney most was Buddy Holly.

He was one of the inventors of rock & roll.

And, as with anything you invent, you have to make it up.

You can’t just copy what went before.

If you want a sound you have to create it.

Two of his most influential records were ‘Everyday’ and ‘Not Fade Away’.

There aren’t any drums on ‘Everyday’.

To get the different sound he wanted, the drummer just slapped his leg throughout.

Same thing on ‘Not fade Away’.

The percussion is just drumsticks on a cardboard box.

Lack of money, lack of resources forces you to be creative.

I was at a party at Robin Wight’s house once.

Robin had bought a large chrome sofa by the English/Israeli designer Ron Arad.

Everyone was admiring it.

I knew Ron Arad and we were discussing the sofa.

I said, “I like your work a lot Ron. But, for me, your earlier furniture seemed more daring. Like the armchairs made from the seats of a Rover 3 Litre car and some bent scaffolding-pipes. What’s changed?”

Ron thought about it a bit.

Then he said, “Now I am famous, if I have an idea, whatever it is, I can always find the money to make it. When I was poor I had to think more.

I had to find other, more creative ways to do it.”

That was a really good lesson for me.

Money may not be helpful to creativity.

Money may make us creatively lazy.

I see lots of articles about what happened to creativity in UK advertising.

Well the drop in creativity seems to me to coincide with the rise of computer generated graphics (CG).

We don’t need to think of a clever way to do anything.

Now, CG can do everything.

So the answer’s simple: money.

And whoever’s got the money can buy what looks like creativity.

But it isn’t really.

Because, as with any technological innovation, everyone else has got it, too.

And if we do the same as everyone else, we’ll look like everyone else.

We’ll just be another big money production like all the rest.

And that’s not very creative.

If we want to stand out we’ll need to do of something no one else is doing yet.

And that’s a lot more difficult, because that takes brains.

As Winston Churchill said, “We have no money. We shall have to think.”

Amateurs v professionals

When I was at BMP, I worked on the Labour party advertising. Labour wouldn’t use a professional ad agency. It was seen as too capitalist.

So it was just a bunch of advertising volunteers lead by Chris Powell. It was pretty disorganised with everyone doing something different.

I was given a 10 minute Party Political Broadcast (PPB) to write. We were told to turn up at 10 Downing Street on Saturday morning for a meeting with ‘The Think Tank’.

So my art director, Mike Reynolds, and I went along in his VW camper van. There were no gates at the end of Downing Street in those days. So we just parked in front of number 10.

The policeman opened the door of the VW for us. When we got out all the foreign tourists started taking photos of us. A different policeman let us into number 10. Once you get inside it’s quite a surprise.

From outside it looks like a row of houses. But that’s a facade. Inside it’s one big office building. The assistant showed us into a room and asked us if we’d like a drink.

We said, “Cup of tea please.”

He said, “We can’t do hot drinks, I’m afraid.”

I said, “What can we have then?”

He said, “Whisky, Gin, Vodka, that sort of thing.”

This was Saturday morning.

My introduction to the world of politics. Anyway we took the brief and wrote the 10 minute PPB. By the time ‘The Think Tank’ had finished with it, it was as ineffectual as all PPBs. Just talking heads.

Our one featured Dennis Healy, and two others I don’t remember. So I just wrote all three names at the top of the script. Dennis Healy saw it and refused to do it.

His assistant said, “Mr Healy feels he’s being asked to audition, and he doesn’t do that.”

Sid Roberson was the director. Sid was from South London, and a very muscular bloke. Think of a cross between Dennis Waterman and Mickey Rourke. Sid walked into the library where Dennis Healy was, and shut the door. Five minutes later Sid came out and said, “He’ll do it.”

We asked Sid what changed Dennis Healy’s mind.

Sid said, “I just said, “Look ‘ere Mr ‘Ealy, I ain’t  ‘ere to muck you abaht, and I ain’t ‘ere to be mucked abaht. Alright?”

And so we shot the PPB, but it was a waste of time. It was what it was. A group of professionals behaving like amateurs. Labour did have one brilliant ad, done by Tim Delaney. But they never ran it.

This was the 1970s, a decade of strikes, power cuts, and the three day week. Tim Delaney had a simple black poster, with nothing on it but a candle.

The headline just said: REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED LAST TIME THE TORIES SAID THEY HAD ALL THE ANSWERS?

Apparently Jim Callaghan refused to be associated with knocking advertising. It lacked dignity. So he wouldn’t run it.

He ran a full colour poster with a picture of himself on instead. And of course he lost.

No doubt in a dignified way. Then the Conservatives gave their account to Saatchi.

Who handled it professionally. The brilliance of Saatchi was understanding that in this country, we don’t vote FOR someone.

We vote AGAINST someone. This always puts the incumbent at a disadvantage.

The government tries to defend their record. Which leaves the opposition free to just attack it.

Everyone remembers LABOUR ISN’T WORKING as the best political advertising. But it wasn’t.

Saatchis real brilliance wasn’t in the advertising that got Thatcher elected first time round. That was relatively easy, all they had to do was attack the Labour government. The real brilliance was the election campaigns after that.

The ones that kept The Conservatives in power. Understanding that voters usually vote AGAINST someone, Saatchi made Labour the party to vote against. They treated Labour as the incumbent.

They took Labour’s manifesto, and treated it as if it was their record in government. They made everyone more scared of voting Labour than keeping Thatcher.

They went through the Labour manifesto with a fine-tooth comb. They took their policies and costed them out.

They worked out how much everyone’s tax would have to rise to pay for them. Then they presented them in simple, powerful posters.

One poster featured a massive bomb. And the headline, LABOUR’S TAX BOMBSHELL

Written on the bomb was ‘You’ll Pay £1,250 more tax a year under Labour’.

Another poster featured two massive red boxing gloves coming out of the poster.

Written on one was ‘More Taxes’ and on the other ‘Higher Prices’.

And the headline, LABOUR’S DOUBLE WHAMMY.

While they were at Saatchi, the Tories won three elections straight.

Personally, I don’t think we’ve seen that sort of professionalism in any political advertising since.

Mr Pot, Meet Mr Kettle

I picked up Campaign last week and there was a quote from me.

“This will be accepted by people who are staunchly Conservatives but rejected by people who aren’t. It’s not bad, it’s not wrong, it’s just ineffective and invisible.”

It was referring to the current poster featuring David Cameron.

Campaign was accurately reporting what the Times had quoted me as saying.

So is that what I said?

Well, yes kinda.

It is true that I said those words.

Just not in the way it sounded.

The conversation from which that quote was distilled actually went on for about ten minutes.

The journalist asked me what I thought of the latest Conservative poster.

The one where David Cameron has no tie.

And there’s no Conservative logo.

Would this new depiction of the Conservatives as more relaxed and business-like, convince voters to switch?

I said I didn’t think it was as good as the work Saatchi’s did.

But then I think that was some of the best political advertising ever.

He asked why.

I said, think of political advertising as a Venn diagram.

Core Users in one circle, Core Non-Users in the other.

There’s no point talking to Core Users, they will always vote Conservative.

There’s no point talking to Core Non-Users, they’ll never vote Conservative.

Just like any market, the only people worth talking to are the ones whose minds you can change.

The ones in the overlap.

And how you change their minds is you tell them something new.

Something they didn’t know before.

Or something they never thought of.

Take Saatchi’s poster “Labour’s Tax Bombshell” for instance.

It was a 48-sheet poster filled with a huge black bomb.

Written on the bomb, in white, was the amount each person’s tax was going to have to rise, to cover all the promises Labour were making.

Someone at Saatchi had looked at what the competition were saying and run some numbers.

That was something no one had thought of.

That was something new.

And so it changed the minds of lots of the voters in the overlap.

And that’s where elections are won.

In the overlap.

Slogans and name-calling won’t work.

Slogans just reinforce the status quo.

They don’t change anything.

Slogans are just Core Users and Core Non-Users shouting at each other.

Like the terraces at a football match.

And that’s the conversation I had with the journalist from The Times.

I’m not sure he was listening.

Because he said to me, “But how about this new Conservative poster? David Cameron isn’t wearing a tie, and they’ve left the Conservative party logo off. That’s pretty new and radical isn’t it?”

I felt I wasn’t getting through.

So I said, “Do you seriously think any undecided voter in the overlap is going to change their vote because David Cameron isn’t wearing a tie?”

And he said, “So you’re saying you think the poster’s a load of rubbish then?”

By now I’m just trying to make myself understood about advertising to people in the overlap.

And I said, “Look, this will be accepted by people who are staunchly Conservative but rejected by people who aren’t. It’s not bad, it’s not wrong, it’s just ineffective and invisible.”

And that’s the only part of the discussion that ran.

I'd gotten so involved in what I was saying, I'd forgotten we were talking specifically about a single poster.

I thought we were having a general discussion about political advertising.

But to be fair, all the journalist was doing was picking out the bit that made the best quote.

And dropping what he thought was the boring bit.

I shouldn’t complain.

After all, that’s pretty much what we do.

God is in the detail

Jackie Stewart was Formula One World Champion, three times.

People say what made him a great driver was he was better in the rain than anyone else.

The other Formula One drivers knew that, unlike them, he actually enjoyed driving in it.

The wetter, the better.

So they knew however fast Jackie Stewart was going was the absolute limit.

And they backed off.

They knew they couldn’t pass him in the rain because he loved it.

That was a big factor in him winning three World Championships.

After he retired, I read an interview with him.

He said he actually hated driving in the rain.

It was a myth that he invented and kept going.

Because he knew all the other drivers hated it and feared it, too.

So he saw a way to take advantage.

If he made everyone think he loved it, they wouldn’t try to overtake him.

Jackie Stewart didn’t win Three World Championships just by being the fastest driver.

He won by being the smartest driver.

His motto was, “In order to finish first, first you have to finish.”

He criticised flashier drivers who would get their cars to skid around corners.

Sure it pleased the crowd and looked good.

But it scrubbed valuable rubber off the tyres.

Rubber that might mean a pit stop to change tyres.

A pit stop that might cost ten seconds.

Ten seconds that might be the difference between first place and nowhere.

Jackie Stewart nursed his car round the track, making sure he did as little damage to it as possible.

Because if any part of the car broke, the driver didn’t finish the race.

And if he didn’t finish he couldn’t win.

Jackie Stewart didn’t even drive himself around on ordinary roads.

He had a chauffeur.

He’d seen other racing drivers take their skills onto ordinary roads.

And get killed racing with other drivers.

Because ordinary roads are more dangerous than race tracks.

On a race track everyone is going the same way.

On a race track everyone is a professional.

Everyone knows what everyone else is expected to do.

Ordinary roads aren’t like that.

Mike Hawthorn was a World Champion before Jackie Stewart.

He got killed overtaking near Brighton.

He ran head on into a car coming the other way.

You don’t get cars coming the other way on a race track.

So Jackie Stewart didn’t drive on ordinary roads.

He wasn’t paid to.

The chauffeur was the professional at driving on ordinary roads.

It was his job to get him safely to the race track.

Where, in one drive, he’d earn many times what he paid the chauffeur.

Jackie Stewart was a careful, thoughtful, man.

Everywhere he raced he even took his own doctor, and equipment, along.

In case he crashed, he wanted someone on the spot.

He’d seen too many drivers die on the way to hospital.

And he put a lot of thought into what sort of doctor to take.

Jackie Stewart always said that what gave him a head start over other drivers was that he was dyslexic.

No one knew about dyslexia when he was young.

So everyone just thought he was stupid.

This meant, if he was going to beat anyone else, he’d have to try much, much harder.

He’d have to pay more attention, leave nothing to chance.

He would have to concentrate on every single detail, everywhere.

If he couldn’t compete by being smarter, he’d compete with more effort.

This meant every single thing, no matter how small, was an opportunity.

A way to gain an advantage.

He even used senses other people ignored.

All drivers used their sight, and hearing, and sense of touch.

Jackie Stewart even used his sense of smell.

At one particular race, coming into a fast corner, he smelt new mown grass.

He backed off the accelerator and rounded the corner to find a car had ploughed off the road and onto the grass bank.

He drove round the oil and debris and carried on.

Several other drivers didn’t notice the smell of grass.

Or at least, they didn’t pay any attention.

Either way they crashed, or skidded out of the race.

And Jackie Stewart won.

Any detail you don’t pay attention to, is somewhere you could lose.

Any detail you do pay attention to, is somewhere you could win.

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The value of ignorance

When I was young, I used to stop by my Gran’s house on the way home from school.

We’d have a chat, and she’d make us a pot of tea.

Spooning the tea, from the tea caddy, straight into the pot.

One day she showed me a box of tea bags she’d won at a raffle at the old-people’s centre.

We’d never seen tea bags, so we didn’t know what they were.

We sat around and tried to work it out.

Why would anyone put small amounts of tea into little tissue packets?

Eventually I said, “The only thing I can think of Gran, is maybe it’s divided into spoonfuls. So, you know the way you put one spoonful of tea in the pot for each person? This must be like that.”

So that’s what we assumed it was.

And every time we wanted a pot of tea, Gran would cut the top off the little packets and empty them into the teapot.

See we’d never seen, or even heard, of tea bags before.

Tea came loose, in a packet.

The thing is, to you it must seem obvious.

You can’t imagine a world without tea bags.

How can anyone not know what a teabag is?

But that’s humans.

We can’t believe the world isn’t exactly the same way for everyone else, as it is for us.

But the truth is, you only know what you know.

Until anyone tells you about something, it doesn’t even exist as a possibility.

After you find out about it, the possibility of anyone not knowing doesn’t exist.

And then you can’t go back.

That’s why, whenever we did a pitch, we’d always sit down, before we started finding things out.

We’d always write down everything we knew about the product, the brand, and the market.

At the point we heard we were pitching.

Before we started researching it.

Because that was the only time we’d ever actually be in the same place as the consumer.

As soon as we started to find things out, we moved away from the consumer’s state of knowledge.

And towards the client’s state of knowledge.

And the more we do that, the less use we are to them.

Clients don’t need someone who knows everything they know.

They need someone who knows what they don’t know.

Someone who can operate, for them, in the consumer’s world.

Someone who understands the consumer’s mind.

It’s like looking down different ends of the telescope.

Clients, naturally, look down the end that magnifies the brand or product.

Until it takes up their whole world.

But the consumer is looking through the other end of the telescope.

Where the brand/product may be a tiny part, if it exists at all.

How can you operate in a world like that, unless you understand it?

It’s a zero-sum game.

The more you add to knowledge, the more you loose ignorance.

That’s a good thing to do.

But you can never go back.

Of course, we can do research groups to tell us in detail what people think.

But these are people we’ve paid to sit in a room and think deeply about it.

Our advertising never gets to actually talk to people in this frame of mind.

So that’s an artificial situation.

That can take us away from reality.

The reality we had before we started finding out things.

When we were looking down the consumer end of the telescope.

We can’t acquire knowledge and keep ignorance.

We want to be knowledgeable about all the client’s problems.

We try to know as much about every detail of their brand/product as they do.

So we can impress them.

But it may not help us do the job.

Because the people they want to sell to, probably don’t know everything the client knows.

And they may not even want to.
 

We can’t assume everyone knows what we know.

Ignorance of ignorance isn’t knowledge.
   

 
 

 

What can we learn from prostitutes?

Years ago, I saw an interesting programme on TV.

Six prostitutes were interviewed about what they did, where, how, and why.

Now this is an area I don’t have much knowledge of.

Honest.

But I found it fascinating.

Partially because of the complete variety of the women involved.

But mainly because you totally make up your own rules.

A proper, approved way to do this doesn’t exist.

It’s a bit like the Wild West, you make it up as you go along.

One prostitute was a very poor woman from up north.

She would get the train to Kings Cross once a fortnight, and spend a few nights earning money from the kerb crawlers.

Men driving slowly along in cars, looking for a prostitute.

She talked about various professional tips she’d learned.

Like, you had to make sure before you got in the car, that the passenger door handle hadn’t been removed.

If it had, you didn’t get in.

Because there was no way you could get out in a hurry.

She said she had recently been in a relationship.

She lived with a man.

But she’d ended it when she found he was being unfaithful to her while she was down south working.

Don’t you love that?

Another woman was a middle aged, large-chested woman from Brighton.

She was well spoken, sort of a Hyacinth Bucket type.

Once a month she’d come to London to make some money.

She would meet a man and they’d rent a hotel room for an hour or two.

She said ideally she tried to avoid full sex.

In a cut glass accent, she said, “If possible I try to get the man to relieve himself using the boobies.”

Very sensible.

But my favourite was an attractive blonde.

She was younger and tougher than the others.

A cross between Barbara Windsor and Denise van Outen.

She had a flat not far from the Houses of Parliament.

She said most of her clientele were MPs.

And she proceeded to show the camera crew around her apartment.

It was kind of like a penthouse dungeon.

Thumb-screws, manacles, stocks, chains, hoods, whips, canes.

But my favourite was the rack.

Her clients were forced to lie on the rack and strapped in.

Then she’d turn the wheel and they’d be stretched, in agony.

She was obviously quite proud of this particular instrument of torture.

She explained, “Stretching my clients on the rack takes a lot of strength.

And turning this wheel, I could develop biceps, which I don’t want.

So I’ve had it built with the power-steering unit from a car.

So I can turn it easily, but it still stretches them with full force.”

Very logical.

I loved the way they treated their profession as open to individual interpretation.

I loved the way there didn’t seem to be a right way to do it.

No rules about what would work.

Each woman sorted it out in her own way.

Starting with what was her point of difference.

The one from up north wasn’t very good looking.

So she operated in the dark at the roadside, in cars.

The one from Brighton was relatively posh with a large chest.

So she used that to her own, and her client’s, advantage.

The young blonde found a way to provide her clients with the physical hardship they required.

But without becoming muscular herself.

None of them made up rules about how the profession ought to be.

None of them decided they were spokespeople for their entire trade.

None of them decided that their way of doing it was one rule that worked for all clients in all cases.

None of them claimed to be the person with the secret to how everyone else ought to do it.

Each of them was quite content to be good at what they did.

And let someone else be good at what they did.

None of them claimed to be experts.

Just specialists, in their area.

The woman from Birmingham didn’t say it was all about ROI, and anything else was wasted money.

The woman from Brighton didn’t say that brand was everything and nothing else counted.

The young blonde didn’t say that digital was the new way, and every other way was just dinosaur thinking.

They were specialists in what they did, and they allowed other people to be specialists in what they did.

Unlike people in advertising, they understood there are many different sorts of clients.

And they all have different needs, different budgets, and they present different opportunities for mutual benefit.

If advertising really is comparable with prostitution, we cold learn a lot from the pros.

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Let's do it and see where it goes

Ed Morris was telling me how he thought life worked. He said, most people think you have a plan in life and go for it, simple as that.

Ed said, life wasn’t like that for him. For him life was like Frogger. Frogger is an early computer game.

A frog is on one side of a busy highway, with cars, buses, lorries, going at different speeds in both directions. You have to get the frog to the other side by hopping from vehicle to vehicle.

If you miss, and land on the road, you get squashed. So you have to jump from car to lorry hoping that eventually, somehow you make it to the other side.

You’re not quite sure how. You can’t always see how it’s going to work out. But you have to take a chance.

Jump on a moving vehicle and then jump onto the next moving vehicle. He said that’s what his life had been like.

Decisions about his career, decisions about his personal life. He moved according to what came up: like Frogger.

It’s a good analogy. I hadn’t thought of it before, but it applied to my life too.

When I started at art school I wanted to do painting and sculpture. But I got turned down by seven UK art schools.

Then an art school in New York offered me a scholarship to do graphics. I thought, let’s do it and see where it goes.

So I switched to graphics and went to New York. There I discovered advertising, and I trained as an art director.

But I couldn’t get a job as an art director. Everyone said my ideas were better than my layouts, and I should switch to being a copywriter.

So I thought, let’s do it and see where that goes.

That worked so well I ended up working for John Webster for ten great years. Eventually I wanted to try being a creative director. But I couldn’t get a job as one.

It seemed the only option was open my own agency. So I thought let’s do it and see where it goes.

And we opened GGT, and had ten absolutely brilliant years.

Eventually I left and opened BST, and later WTCS.

Recently, the guys I work with said the agency needed more profile.

They said a blog was free advertising and I should start writing one. I wasn’t keen on the idea.

A blog isn’t about the bits of advertising I enjoy. No ideas, no film-making, no music, no editing, no visuals, no headlines, no straplines.

Just lots and lots of body copy.

But, on the principal of ‘let’s see where it goes’ I thought I’d give it a try. And I found I liked it. And it was good for the agency.

It raised our profile and helped us get on pitch lists.

Then Vinny Warren from Chicago said I should turn it into a book. Vinny is the guy who did the ‘Wassup’ campaign for Budweiser.

When you’re talking to a guy who gets his advertising into the language in every country in the world, you pay attention.

In fact a young art director at Vinny’s agency liked the blog so much his girlfriend copied every single post and turned it into a book for him.

It made me look at it differently. Maybe it wasn’t just a conventional blog. Maybe it could be more of an online book in progress.

Then I talked to Vik Kanyo, who’s a student at Watford.

He said Tony Cullingham had copied out every single post from the blog. And he made all the students on the course read it.

Now Tony Cullingham has run the Watford course for years and years. In fact without Tony there wouldn’t even be a Watford course.

Every year he turns out the cream of the advertising graduates. Tony’s students get as many jobs as all the other graduates put together.

Watford is the Oxbridge of advertising courses. So I thought, if Vinny Warren says do it, and Tony Cullingham says do it, who am I to argue.
 

Let’s do it, and see where it goes.

What good is outrage

Recently, Steve Henry and I separately wrote that creatives naturally enjoy getting into trouble, and that’s a good thing.

In our terms, trouble means creating controversy. Controversy means people will take sides. Which means discussion and debate and consequently free media.

I gave some examples of this, and how well it had worked. Then Tod Norman wrote in to say that all the examples I had given “had generated no income.”

He went on to say that this “proves that outrage engages, but does not create profit.”

I think that’s an interesting point, and worth debating. Outrage for its own sake isn’t what we do. Everything we do must have an objective purpose. Otherwise it’s merely decorative, not functional.

It didn’t occur to me to at the time to choose examples that had generated profit. I see the job of the creatives as maximising the effect of the spend.

Our job is to deliver the strategy as loudly and memorably as possible. So that we generate many times more media than we’re paying for. But it did make me think.

Did any of the examples I gave actually generate income? Well LWT certainly.

We didn’t even have the actual LWT account. Just the trade budget that they usually spent in Campaign and Marketing.

Mike Gold persuaded them to put it on 48 sheet posters and run them next to ad agencies.

The controversial campaign caused outrage, and won lots of awards. Normally this wouldn’t matter. But in this case it got LWT talked about inside agencies much more.

Which got it on the media department’s radar. Which caused advertising spend to shift from their rival, Thames TV.

So yes, outrage generated profit. The Cadbury’s campaign I mentioned worked well, too. Crème Eggs were only available between Christmas and Easter. Stock that wasn’t sold hung around until next year. By which time they didn’t look so appetising. So we had to get people buying them at times other than Easter.

Planning told us everyone had an individual way of eating Creme Eggs. So we found a way to make and run six 48 sheet posters for the price of one. This meant we could run a campaign with cheeky rhymes like, ‘Give It A Suck, Chuck’, ‘Stick It in Your Gob, Bob’, ‘Give It a Lick, Mick’.

They got into the language and made the product more current. So much so, that you can now buy Crème Eggs all year round. Another time controversy was good for Cadburys was the Flake ad that. Gordon Smith and Dave Waters made.

A skimpily dressed girl was perspiring and sensuously eating a Flake, while a lizard clambered over a ringing phone.

It was so erotic, even Spitting Image lampooned it. They showed a man entering a porn shop and asking for ‘something really hard core”. He’s offered some magazines like ‘Screw’ and ‘Hustler’.

He says, “No, something really hard core, like the new Cadburys Flake ad.”

They throw him out of the porn shop in disgust. Dominic Cadbury, was so outraged, he wanted to pull it straight away. (The ad that is.)

Then the marketing department explained to him that they’d had to turn another product line over to making Flakes. Just to satisfy demand.

Another instance would be the Saatchi gallery in North London. There was a photographic exhibition of snapshots of a family. It was innocuous, not to say dull, and not many people went to it.

Then someone (we can speculate who) called the police to complain that the children were naked in some of the photographs. The police closed the exhibition down.

Immediately many media celebrities (we can speculate who prompted them) protested this infringement of the artist’s creative rights.

The police were forced to reopen the exhibition. And hundreds of people came to see what all the fuss was about. It was one of the most successful exhibits in the gallery’s history.

And that’s a gallery you had to pay several quid to enter. For another example, ask Steve Henry about Tango’s advertising. Tango was a moribund orange drink when his agency got the account.

HHCL’s first commercial showed a little fat orange man slapping someone’s ears with both hands. Newspapers carried stories that parents and schools were outraged at the damage done to children’s ears. Tango seemed anti-establishment and even rebellious. Sales went through the roof.

Another example would be London Docklands advertising. They were going nowhere as a development site. They were being made to look really bad by Milton Keynes’ advertising.

Their commercials showed beautiful fields, cows, trees, and happy families. They made Docklands look gritty and urban.

We figured we’d reposition Milton Keynes as the place to play. And show London Docklands as the place to work.

So we ran a campaign for London Docklands with the line, “Why move to the middle of nowhere, when you can move to the middle of London?”

The Environment Minister and a group of 11 MPs were so outraged they tried to ban the advertising. They failed because the ads were shot and the media already paid for. The ads ran, and London Docklands now has the tallest buildings in Europe.

And Milton Keynes still has fields, cows, and trees.

They want you to fit in, because then they can ignore you

Last week in his Campaign blog, Steve Henry was lamenting the fact so few agencies enjoy taking risks.

Everyone wants to be successful, but only in a safe way. No wonder most advertising doesn’t work.

Maybe the greatest art director ever was Helmut Krone. At the end of his life, someone asked him why advertising had become so predictable.

He said, “We were anti-establishment. But nowadays the kids want to be part of the establishment.”

It reminded me of a Picasso quote, “When the avante garde becomes the establishment, you’re in trouble.”

And the wrong kind of trouble. The dull, boring kind.

 

Personally I much prefer Marlon Brando’s response in The Wild One. He has ‘Black Rebels Motorcycle Club’ printed on the back of his jacket.

A woman asks him what he’s rebelling against. He says, “Whadya got?”

Surely for a creative person, the whole point is to get into trouble. To cause controversy.

Because if our ads can do that people are talking about them, writing about them.

We can get into the language, in the papers, maybe even on the news. And each time it’s another free OTS for our ads. Media we aren’t paying for.

The whole point is to generate the equivalent of a big budget from a small budget.

Sure if you’ve got a P&G size budget, you can afford to be safe. Your ads don’t have to work hard because you can outspend the competition.

But it you can’t afford that, your ads need to work harder. They need to get noticed and talked about. So they need to be different, they need to take risks. They need to get into the language.

And to do that, your competition isn’t just other ads. It’s all other media.

Steve remembered an LWT poster we did, for a religious programme called Credo, that got death threats.

It featured the Ayatollah Khomeini with a shadow of a hanged man on the wall next to him.

The headline said, “HE’S SAVING PEOPLE FROM CHOOSING THE WRONG RELIGION”.

We used to enjoy getting threats. It meant people were paying attention.

We once got threats to burn down Cadburys factories in India for a poster that Damon Collins and Mary Wear did.

It seemed innocuous enough to us. A cartoon of a man taking off his turban with a Cadburys Creme Egg underneath. And the headline, KEEP ANOTHER ONE HANDY, GANDHI.

We got often got legal threats too. We got one from the Arsenal manager who said our LWT poster helped get him the sack.

They were a boring team in those days, and Nick Wray wrote the headline. THIS SUNDAY EVEN ARSENAL FANS CAN WATCH LIVE FOOTBALL.

We even got a legal threat from the Kray twins, inside prison. Nick wrote a London Docklands commercial featuring ‘the Crow twins’, Ronnie and Reggie. It ended with on crow’s feet sticking out of a cement mixer.

The real Ronnie and Reggie said this could stop them getting a parole.

But controversy doesn’t just result in threats.

We once did an anti Third World Debt ad, featuring previously unreleased concentration camp footage.

That caused the entire German delegation to get up and walk out at Cannes.

We made those ads as controversial as possible because we had no money at all. Not a penny. And that was the only way we could get the issue on the political agenda.

But strangely enough, the ads that get you into most trouble are often the ones you least expect.

The commercial we did that got record numbers of complaints was for a company that checked brakes and steering on cars.

In a little ten-second ad, Dave Waters had an animated hedgehog say to camera, “Why don’t you lot get your brakes checked?”

Then it turned and walked off, revealing it had been squashed flat.

I think every animal lover in the country complained. And again, we got lots of free media.

Nowadays of course all this would work even better. Because everyone who heard about it could go straight to YouTube to watch the ad.

And much more hype could be generated via Twitter, Facebook, and blogs.

Now there’s more reason and more opportunity than ever to create controversy, and free advertising.

Isn’t that what creative people enjoy?

As Steve Jobs’ said, “Who wants to be in the navy? It’s much more fun to be a pirate?”

Truly creative people love to rock the boat. To upset the status quo.

That’s what disruption is all about.

I read an interview with the 85 year old Tony Benn. He said, “I had a death threat recently, I was so pleased. I haven’t had one for ages. It shows I’m not past it.”

The quality of the thinking is inversely proportional to the length of the words.

I heard an American radio show recently featuring prank calls. In this case a father had called in to set-up his daughter. She’d taken her car into the garage and was waiting for an estimate. Her dad said she knew nothing about cars so they could wind her up.

So the DJ phoned her and pretended to be the mechanic.
He said, “I’m afraid you’re going to need the water in your headlights changed.”
She said, “Okay, will that be expensive?”
He said, “Well it depends on what water we use.”
She said, “What sort do you normally use?”
He said, “Well we could use tap-water, it’ll do the job in the short term. But it’s not ideal.”
She said, “What do you recommend?”
He said, “Well, if you want to do the job properly I’d recommend Evian.”She said, “Okay, I guess it is the best.”

Now you might find it amazing that a grown woman agreed to have the water in her headlights changed. But, like a lot of people, she was intimidated by her own fear of looking stupid. She was convinced she knew nothing about cars and how they worked. Consequently, she was convinced that any question she asked would make her look stupid. Consequently she didn’t ask any questions. Consequently she was treated as if she was stupid.

Personally I work on the principle that knowledge comes from questioning things. If a thing is right they must be able to explain it. And if they can’t explain it, maybe it isn’t right.

That’s why, when any word crops up that I don’t understand, I immediately ask what it means. Clever people will want to explain it. People who are trying to blag me won’t. Sometimes the people who use the long words don’t even know what they mean themselves. They’re just using the word because they’ve heard someone else use it. And it sounded impressive.

So they think it’ll make them sound more impressive too. These are people who are worried about the poor quality of their thinking. They want to make it look more impressive by using long words.

I find there’s a simple equation for this. The quality of the thinking is inversely proportional to the length of the words used.

You either take a complicated thought and make it simple.  Or you take a simple thought and make it complicated. Long words are the decoration, the jewellery, the chrome. Long words are the bling. This season’s must-have accessory. As you might expect, there’s an awful lot of buzz-words in our business.

Words that people use because they think it gives them credibility. Like wearing a brand.

About a year ago the must-have words were ‘robust’ and ‘iteration’. No presentation was complete without ‘robust data’ and the ‘current iteration’ of the campaign.

Currently the must-have words are ‘granular’ and ‘heueristics’. No presentation today is complete without ‘granular data’ and a need for ‘new heuristic processes’. Does it work, is there a point?

Well we are in the presentation business after all. Maybe this language is our packaging, our added-value.  Maybe clients are impressed. If the thinking isn’t up to much, the least we can do is dress it up.

If we said to a client, ‘We’re taking a more granular approach to our heueristics, to give us a more robust iteration of the previous data.” A client might think that sounds like we’re really good at our job.

Whereas if we said, “We’re looking more carefully at the numbers so we can make better decisions.” They’d probably say, well duh.