The facts may not be the facts

At the beginning of the First World War, British soldiers went into battle wearing cloth caps. Obviously a lot of them died.

The government had to do something fast. So they issued every soldier with a tin helmet. They thought that would solve the problem.

But it seemed to make it worse. The number of injuries rose dramatically, and many more soldiers ended up in hospital.

At first they couldn’t work out what was wrong. Were the helmets restricting the soldiers’ vision? Were the helmets making them foolhardy? What was wrong?

It turned out that nothing was wrong. The helmets were working perfectly, which was why more soldiers were ending up in hospital. Because they weren’t dead.

The most lethal weapon in the early days of the war was the air-burst artillery shell.

As the troops were advancing, the shells would explode above the ground.

Shrapnel would go straight through the cloth caps and take their heads off.

But the shrapnel couldn’t penetrate the tin helmets. So it hit the rest of their body.

And they were wounded instead of killed. And hospital admissions showed a sharp upturn. Looking at the facts differently presents a completely different picture.

Later in the war it became apparent that Britain was in danger of losing the war to the U boats.

Britain is an island, it can only be supplied by sea. If the Germans cut this link, Britain could be starved into submission.

One answer was to form the cargo ships into large groups. Convoys that could be protected by Royal Navy warships. But when they looked at the numbers they saw there were thousands of ships sailing from British ports every day.

They couldn’t possibly arrange that many ships into convoys. So they didn’t try, and Britain nearly lost the war.

Until someone spotted that 90% of those ships were sailing across the English Channel to France.

The trip was so short they didn’t need protecting. The vital 10% of ships that were going to North America could easily be formed into convoys.

And, in two world wars, that was the system that won the Battle of the Atlantic. But, if no one had bothered looking at the numbers differently, we’d all be speaking German.

When I was at BMP, we were working on a COI account: Fire Prevention. In those days, most domestic fires were due to chip-pan fires.

David Batterby was our MD, and he came to see me, really excited. He said he and the planner had just had a great idea. Here it is:

Creative Leap

What measure will the COI use to evaluate if the fire-prevention campaign is successful?

Obviously, the only measure they’ve got is the number of times fire engines are called out.

So the real focus of the campaign is to
reduce Fire Brigade responses.

Creative Leap

How can we reduce the number of call-outs? Well if people could put the fire out themselves, they wouldn’t need to call the fire brigade. So let’s tell them how to put out a chip-pan fire.

Creative Leap

But this is a ‘fire prevention’ campaign.

So let’s show them how to put out a chip-pan fire in such a scary way that they never want to have one. So that was the brief the account group gave the creatives. After the campaign ran, Fire Brigade callouts to chip-pan fires went down by 40%.

We won a D&AD silver award for the ads. But the real creative work was done before the brief got anywhere near the creative department.

Advertising doesn't work like we think it does

A couple of years back, I noticed a lot of stories in the paper about a split in the Church of England.

Apparently, the C of E had run a campaign that had caused a controversy amongst bishops. I was quite surprised the C of E had such a high profile.

This story was at least half a page in all the national daily papers. Plus it made the TV news, and interviews on radio programmes.

It just shows you, Christianity is still a big topic in a lot of people’s lives. It must be to be capable of causing such controversy.

If it’s such a big deal in the papers. It’s obviously still relevant to the majority of people. At least that’s what I thought.

Then I met the PR guy who worked on it. He told me the C of E had come to him with a brief to get their profile up. And they had no money.

So his start point was, we need to start people talking about them. Create a controversy.

But if we have no money, we have no media. No, but we do have a lot of churches, 13,000 in fact.

And at least half of those churches have bulletin boards in front. And each bulletin board is a potential poster site. And a national campaign of 6,000 posters is a big campaign. So we do have media after all.

And so they briefed a campaign of posters that would fit this media (about 3 feet tall by 6 feet wide).

I saw one of these posters up. It said “Crucified. Made to wear a crown of thorns. Speared in the side. Now that’s what you call a bad-hair day.”

I didn’t like the poster. But what was brilliant was what the PR guy did with it.

He sent copies of it to all the bishops and asked them what they thought of it. Naturally, some of them liked it and some of them didn’t.

He then called up the papers and told them there was a split in the C of E over whether they should be advertising or not.

He said it was the old guard versus the modernisers.

He said it was a rift that went to the heart of how the C of E saw itself in the modern world.

He created the story and gave it to the papers.

The editors always need a story, they’ve got a paper to fill every day.

And one that comes to them is better than one they have to go looking for.

So they ran his story.

The Church of England got massive national coverage. Their profile went up, as briefed. They got millions of pounds of media for the cost of a few small posters.

That’s real creativity.

The same guy was telling me about the Sony ‘Balls’ commercial that was shot in San Francisco.

He said the PR company got involved before the commercial was shot.

They went to the local papers in San Francisco and told them about the shoot.

They said it was quite a feather in San Francisco’s cap.

Of all the places in the world they could have chosen to shoot, a UK company was coming all the way to their city to shoot a commercial that would run all over Europe.

For the local papers this was a big story.

So they ran lots of articles and pictures of the shoot.

The PR guy then took all these stories and sent them to all the English newspapers.

He said, “Look, this commercial isn’t even running in the USA, yet it’s so big even their newspapers are giving it all this coverage.”

The UK papers then ran stories about the Sony commercial before it had even run on our TVs. Including spot times when it was on, so you could look out for it.

The effect of this was to magnify the commercial into a big event, like a movie launch. Way beyond the media the client was paying for.

Now that’s real creativity.

Which is why Alex Bogusky says that, often when Crispin Porter Bogusky get a brief, they don’t start by thinking about advertising.

They start by thinking, “If we had a PR campaign running after the ads broke, what would that look like?”

Then they work backwards from there.

TV advertising is just the trigger for the PR.

Which is how they came up with their Burger King campaign.

They thought, “What would you be prepared to sacrifice for a Whopper?” would make an interesting story.

Then they thought, how do we make that happen?

So they did the promotion, “Sacrifice ten friends from your ‘Facebook Friends’ list and we’ll give you a free Whopper.”

And, to turn it into a controversial story for the media, it then became, “Which ten friends are you prepared to sacrifice?”

And of course, they got many times the media they were paying for.

Which is what advertising should be doing.

 

Even if it isn’t always advertising.

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.

Living in the overlap

Everyone knows the Smoky Robinson song “Tears Of A Clown”.

But did you know who wrote it?

Turns out it was Stevie Wonder.

Apparently he was only about 13 at the time.

But that’s not what fascinated me about it.

There’s a line in it: “Just like Pagliacci did, I’ll try to keep my sadness hid.”

Now a lot of middle class English people hear that and scoff at the grammar.

Because of course, the last word shouldn’t be “hid”, it should be “hidden”.

But that wouldn’t rhyme, so he went with what was good rather than what was correct.

The interesting thing for me is that the same people who scoff at the grammar usually don’t know who Pagliacci was.

Or what he’s got to do with that song.

And yet a 13 year old black kid from Detroit took it for granted that Pagliacci’s story was so well known he could use him in a pop song.

The opera about a clown whose heart is breaking behind a painted-on smile.

I think that’s brilliant.

Think of it as a Venn diagram, two overlapping circles.

The circle on the left is people who only ever listen to pop music, watch football, read The Sun, drink beer, and watch TV.

The circle on the right is people who only ever listen to classical music, watch ballet, read The Guardian or Telegraph, drink wine, and read books.

And the part where Stevie Wonder lives, like all truly creative people, is in the bit where they overlap.

The part where new and surprising connections can happen.

The part Faris Yakob calls ‘recombinant thinking’.

Faris Yakob is a new-media guru, and he makes the point that all new ideas are actually just new combinations of existing things.

If we accept that, then what we should be doing is making sure we experience as many different things as possible.

We should make an effort to experience things that don’t go together.

So we can make new combinations happen.

This happened in America’s big cities naturally.

Because they didn’t grow gradually over centuries, like the rest of the world.

They were thrown together, and grew rapidly due to immigration.

So previously incompatible things were constantly side-by-side.

But a growing boy didn’t know they were supposed to be mutually exclusive.

He’d just experience it all as natural and put it all together.

He’d hear Italian immigrants playing opera from their windows, and on the next street rhythm and blues, or boogie woogie.

Martin Scorcese makes the same point about his childhood in New York.

He would watch from his window and see fights in the streets below.

At the same time opera was playing from the open windows above.

If you’ve seen “Raging Bull” you’ll recognise this use of that unexpected combination.

I once read a book on mathematics by an Indian professor.

One point she made resonated with me.

She said we need to study ourselves.

To find out what side of the brain we are dominant in.

 (Left brain being the rational side, right brain being the emotional.)

Then we need to spend as much time as we can exposing ourself to influences from the other side.

Because whatever side is dominant is our comfort zone.

We’ll naturally gravitate to that.

But anything we learn in our comfort zone won’t give us any new combinations.

Whereas whatever we learn on the other side of the brain gives us a completely new set of possible links to our existing side.

So we should force ourselves to experience whatever we’re not comfortable with.

If you’re a numeric person, force yourself to experience art and music.

If you’re a visual person, force yourself to read more books.

If you like fiction, make yourself to read non-fiction.

If you like rock music make yourself listen to Classic FM.

Explore.

While we’re in our comfort zone we’re on auto pilot.

We’re relaxing and letting it wash over us.

But when we move out of our comfort zone our mind is forced to think.

Forced to try to find something good in what we don’t like.

Staying in our comfort zone just means staying with what we already know.

There’s no growth there.

No possibilities for new combinations.

Paul Arden used to say, “It’s good to feel uncomfortable.”

We shouldn’t be frightened to feel uncomfortable.

We don’t need to live in either of the two big comfortable, predictable circles.

We can live in the overlap.

There's a whole other world out there

A woman I know, called Helen, is a hippy and loves going to India. She likes to get up early in the morning and watch the dawn on the banks of The Ganges.

She told me about the funeral pyres. She was watching a man whose job it was to make sure the bodies burn properly. You see the bodies on the pyres burn from the centre. So the extremities overhang the fire and may not burn properly.

This man had a long metal pole. He used the pole to fold the feet and head in to make sure they burn, too.

She was watching him doing this when another man emerged from the Ganges. He’d been bathing and the bottom part of his clothes was wet. So he took them off and wrapped a towel around his waist.

Then he gave the clothes to the man with the pole. He put the clothes on the long metal pole. Then they both chatted while he dried the wet clothes over the funeral pyre.

When they were dry he gave them back. The other man put them back on, said goodbye and left. No one thought it was anything about it. Except Helen.

The western side of her was uncomfortable at the disrespectful way they treated a dead body. The other side of her was impressed with such a matter-of-fact approach to life and death.

Hindus believe in reincarnation. So the body was just something that the soul had finished with.

It had no more use. In our world a soul is hypothetical. The body is the only proof that anyone ever actually existed. So we treat it with the respect we’d show that person.

Other cultures look strange to us. We can’t help feeling that our culture is right and theirs is the odd one. The world either shrinks to where our mind is. Or we expand our mind to encompass the world.

Usually though, we can’t help taking our way as the norm and everyone else’s as a variant. For instance, all over England during the Napoleonic wars everyone feared an invasion. In Hartlepool, on the north east coast, a ship was wrecked during a storm. The only living creature to be washed ashore was the ship’s pet monkey. A small creature in a frilly waistcoat.

In those days most people didn’t travel more than ten miles from where they were born, during their whole lifetime. So the people of Hartlepool had no knowledge of the world outside their immediate vicinity.

This creature was similar to most Englishmen: it had ten fingers and ten toes. And it wore a waistcoat. But it was smaller, and hairier, and jabbered away in a language they couldn’t understand.

They’d never heard about monkeys, or apes, or chimpanzees. There was only one conclusion. They thought it must be a Frenchman. So the people of Hartlepool hanged it as a spy.

We forget that the world we know isn’t all that exists. We interpret the world based purely on what’s going on in our minds. You can find it even in the everyday world of advertising.

Years ago, at GGT, we did an advertising campaign for a credit card called Access. We wanted to make it as accepted as Barclaycard. So we used a Louis Jordan track, “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My baby?”

And we changed the words to, “Does you does or does you don’t take Access?” We had an animated lobster on a plate in a restaurant. He was singing the song to a diner wondering how to pay.

While the voice over told us seven million outlets worldwide took Access. And we ended on a picture of the earth. Supered over it was the title “The world does.”

Gordon said to me, “Should the W in World be in upper case or lower case?” I said, “Good question. If it’s ‘the world’ as in everyone on the planet, then I guess it’s lower case. But if it’s ‘The World’ as in the name of the planet, the I guess it’s upper case.”

We didn’t want to get it wrong, so we got the account man to check. He called up Cambridge University and spoke to the professor of English.

He repeated the entire script and asked him if it was more correct for the W to be in upper case or lower case. The English Professor spluttered, “You can’t possibly say ‘Does you does or does you don’t?”

Fair point. We’d forgotten that the whole entire ad was grammatically off-piste. We’re all so much in our own heads we forget there’s another world out there.

Freedom equals responsibility

Recently, GMTV asked me to go along and talk about alcohol advertising on morning TV. When I got there I found it was a bit of a stitch-up. The interview was actually about banning alcohol advertising. And I was supposed to be the bad guy.

The government claimed advertising was to blame for binge drinking. So, being interviewed alongside me, there was a very nice 23 year-old woman who had a history of binge drinking. She said that one of the things that caused her to start was the advertising for Bacardi Breezers.

The interviewer asked me if I felt responsible. I said, “The job of advertising is to sell product or brands when, where, and how we’re legally allowed to. My relationship with my client is to do the best job I can to take sales away from their competitors.”

He said, “So what you’re saying is that you think it’s okay to encourage young people to drink more?”

I said, “I don’t encourage anyone to drink more. I’m not legally allowed to and that’s not my job. It’s my job to make sure that, if you are allowed to drink, you drink the brand I’m advertising.”

He turned to the young woman on the sofa and said, “So basically he’s perfectly happy for young people drink to excess as long as they drink the brand he’s advertising. Do you think that’s a responsible attitude?”

She said, “Well no, I don’t think you should be able to encourage young people to drink to excess.”

I said, “We’re not legally allowed to encourage young people to drink to excess. There are many controls in place to ensure we don’t do that. My job is to make sure that people who the law says can drink, choose my client’s brand over the competition.”

He said, “But you must take some responsibility for the results of people drinking to excess.”

I said, “I don’t make the law. What I do is sell my client’s brand above their competitor’s brand.”

He said, “And you’re willing to sell as much of your client’s product as possible?”

I said, “Yes of course. That’s what I’m paid for. That’s how democracy and capitalism work. I work within the law to take sales from my client’s competitors.”

He said, “Well you’re very successful at it according to the governments figures on young people binge-drinking.”

And so the interview went on, in a sort of Daily Mail style. With him purposely misunderstanding what I was saying in order to have a scapegoat. The part I found confusing in all this was that at no point did anyone consider the young woman’s role.

She was just assumed to be a passive recipient of mind-altering advertising. As if she herself had no responsibility in choosing to binge-drink. She was just a victim. Does the same thing work with all advertising?

Mark & Spencer’s advertising makes their food look utterly seductive. In fact it’s Y&R’s job to make it seem irresistible. So, if I eat too much food and become obese, can I blame advertising? Or do I have any free choice in the matter of how much to eat?

Audi’s ads make their cars look better than their competitors. In fact it’s BBH’s job to make them utterly desirable. So, if I buy a car and drive too fast and kill someone, can I blame advertising? Or do I have free choice in the matter of how fast to drive?

All advertising agencies try to make the products they’re selling look desirable. That’s their job. Whether it’s holidays, toys, clothes, furniture, computers, telephones, newspapers, chocolate, or lawnmowers. That’s what selling is.

So, if I rob a bank to get the money to buy all those things, and get caught, can I blame advertising? Or do I have free choice about what I can afford or not? I thought the whole point of a free society was to let everyone know what their choices where.

Then let them choose. If we don’t let people choose, they’re not really free are they? But, there’s another side to that coin. If we are free to choose, we have to take responsibility for our choices.

So it’s a simple equation:  more freedom = more responsibility. And that’s hard for people. To take responsibility for the bad choices they made.

As Sartre said, “We are condemned to be free.”

It’s better than real, it’s fake

Kenwood House in North London is impressive. The exterior, the interior, and the gardens. As you approach you notice the perfect symmetry of the house.

Both wings match exactly, windows delicately balancing each other either side of the entrance. Once inside, you’re impressed by the library. Both the extensive collection of books and the large marble pillars.

Looking out over the grounds you’re impressed by the almost perfect view. A Constable-style landscape gently rolling down to a meandering stream, disappearing under a wooden bridge. It all seems too perfect to be real. And it is. It’s all fake.

A huge, beautiful, elegant, impressive fake. Robert Adams did the house, in the late 18th century. Capability Brown did the gardens.

Take the beautiful marble pillars in the library. They’re actually made from wood, and painted to look exactly like carved white marble. There are no books in the impressive library either. Just the spines stuck to the wall.

The beautifully symmetrical windows are complete fakes on one side. Stuck to the outside wall of the music room, which requires solid brick walls for its acoustic qualities.

The beautiful view of the gardens is worth investigating. When you walk down to the stream it’s actually two ponds and, on the left, the cut-out shape of a bridge stuck next to them.

A clump of trees between the ponds connects them in your eye, and the ‘bridge’ confirms the direction the ‘stream’ goes in.
The whole of Kenwood house is an exercise in trickery and manipulation. The late 18th century was the height of The Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was born out of The Reformation. The idea that man wasn’t just a slave to fear and superstition anymore.

For the first time, with reason and logic, man was able to work out and control his own destiny. And Trompe L’Oeil was a visual manifestation of that. Trompe L’Oeil just means “trick the eye”, what we’d call an illusion.

It became very fashionable in the late 18th century. A way to demonstrate that the eye, and consequently the mind, could easily be fooled and manipulated. Our senses couldn’t be trusted. We needed to stop ‘believing’ in things and make the effort to think for ourselves.

This is what separated the cultured individual from the merely wealthy. Previously, a person’s worth was based on wealth.
If you wanted a beautiful house, you just built it. And the cost demonstrated how rich you were.

The Enlightenment signalled a change from money as the main indication of someone’s worth. Now intelligence was a much higher value. Intelligence was demonstrated by an understanding, for the first time, of the mind’s importance.

That the mind actually in fact determined reality. Trompe L’Oeil was a visual manifestation of this. If you trick the eye you trick the mind. This was far cleverer than merely spending money on something that just looked like what it was.

How dull. How wasteful. It was better to use your brains rather than just throw money at it. Far more clever to out think someone rather than just out spend them.

Take a look around at the advertising we’re doing today. Where million pound commercials are no longer anything unusual.
Where people brag in print that their commercial is the most expensive commercial ever filmed.

Do we think advertising could learn anything from Robert Adams and Capability Brown? From Trompe L’Oeil and The Age Of Enlightenment? Anything?

All the real Englishmen are in America

My brother-in-law is from Indiana. One time we were in a bar discussing something over a few cold beers.

I forget exactly how the subject came up, but he made a remark that resonated with me. He said, “All the real Englishmen are in America. The ones that stayed in England are just the wimps who were happy to let the King tell them what to do.”

Now okay, that’s over-simplistic (well we were in a bar, and cold refreshment had been taken). But is there a nugget of truth there?

In the early days America was peopled by England’s rebels and Europe’s rejects. Englishmen that didn’t want to put up with the centuries old status quo went to the colonies.

Oliver Cromwell was preparing to emigrate to America when he was persuaded to stay and lead the revolution. Possibly the last real revolutionary we had.

After Cromwell died we had The Restoration. And everything went back to pretty much the way it had been.

A while ago I read a book on Industrial Design. What’s interesting is the concept of design itself started in America. Because there was a need for it.

There was no need for it in Europe. It was mass production that caused a need for design. A standardised product that could be reproduced to an exact format.

Americans needed mass production because the immigrants were Europe’s poor. People who had nothing because they were unskilled. So they tried to make a new life.

The skilled classes were happy to stay in Europe where they had a relatively good life. This meant that America had a massive, unskilled workforce. What could they do with it?

They created the production line. Products made by unskilled workers. Contrary to belief, it wasn’t Henry Ford who invented the production line.

The first time anyone in Europe had ever seen a standardised product was Samuel Colt’s pistols at The Great Exhibition half a century earlier. It was an amazing concept. Every piece on every pistol was exactly the same.

So, if you found two broken pistols on the battlefield, you could cannibalise one for parts to fix the other. Previously they’d both be useless because they were both built separately. So nothing from one would fit the other. You’d have to send both pistols back to the manufacturers.

Standardisation was a revolutionary concept. And Ford wasn’t even the first car manufacturer to employ it.

In 1905, Oldsmobile shipped three horseless carriages to England. They drove them from Southampton to London. Then they took them apart, mixed up all the parts, and rebuilt three new horseless carriages.

Then they drove them back to Southampton. (Wouldn’t that still make a great demonstration commercial today?)

At the time everyone was gobsmacked. How could a country that was made up of unskilled workers, who couldn’t get jobs in Europe, build something better than skilled craftsmen?

Worse, standardisation was something that would eventually make skilled craftsmen redundant.

Take ordinary horse-drawn wagons for instance. Before standardisation all wagons, had different sized wheels.

So, if your wagon needed a new wheel, you’d take it to the wheel-maker and he’d measure all your other wheels and make you a new one. With standardisation, you had a man doing nothing but making identical wheels. When you needed a wheel, you’d just go along and buy one.

So the American revolution reversed the whole process. The country made up of unskilled immigrants became innovative and powerful. The country made up of skilled workers became complacent and traditional. Because America was forced to invent itself.

So getting a jump on the competition became mandatory. For survival, they learned to constantly reinvent themselves. To never rest on their laurels. To accept that they always had to be looking for an advantage.

In the UK we were more skilled, so we learned to carry on doing what we were good at. Craftsmanship.

Maybe there’s a parallel with current advertising there. The proportions of good to bad are roughly the same in both places. But the best of American is fresh and raw, powerful and crude, innovative and polarising.

British is slicker, better crafted and executed, but lacking life. Nothing too challenging, nothing outrageous, nothing to upset the status quo.

Something we can all nod along to, made with great skill. Maybe an analogy would be Bauhaus furniture versus Chippendale furniture.

Bauhaus was controversial, original thinking, adequately executed. Chippendale was predictable, traditional thinking, beautifully crafted.

Maybe my brother-in-law was right in the bar all that time ago. When all those Englishmen went to America something else went too.