Dave Trott’s Blog

The spirit of the law v The letter of the law

Dave Trott — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:28:00 GMT

When I was a student, I used to make extra money counting the votes at elections.

At East Ham Town hall, we were told to only count votes that were clearly marked with an X next to a candidate’s name. Anything else should be counted as a spoiled vote. We should put it aside to be adjudicated by the Town Clerk later.

As I was counting, one of the votes clearly didn’t meet those criteria. It had a massive black cross running corner to corner across the whole ballot paper. Obviously this person was angry. Disgusted and frustrated, with the candidates, with the system, maybe with democracy in general.

Either way, it didn’t fit the criteria I’d been given. It was pretty obviously a spoiled vote. So I put it aside.

At the end of the evening, the Town Clerk was going through the spoiled votes and he came to that one.

He said, “Well the X intersects at the Conservative candidate’s name. So that was obviously intended as a vote for him”.

And that’s how it was counted.

It didn’t look that way to me. But it made perfect sense to the Town Clerk.

To me it seemed like someone wanting to register their disgust with all the candidates. But that was my intuitive feeling.

It couldn’t be argued by pure logic. Logically, the Town Clerk adhered to the literal interpretation of the criteria.

The only candidate whose name this X could be said to be next to, was the one where the two lines crossed. The Conservative.

This is a logical interpretation versus an intuitive interpretation. It’s why creatives have such problems with research. There’s often no room for intuition, for feeling. Just literal interpretation of the research in a very mechanical way.

But human beings aren’t mechanical. We’re meat, not metal.

In research, people can’t always put into words exactly what they’re feeling. So they get as close as they can.

But this is often taken literally, and dissected bit-by-bit.

My dad was policeman. He always taught me that the correct interpretation is ‘the spirit of the law’ not ‘the letter of the law’.

In other words, use your common sense. Don’t be like a robot. Something may make perfect sense in a literal, mechanical interpretation. But it may not work in the real world.

Experts seem to agree that around 25% of communication is verbal. What you say, the actual words you use.

But apparently 75% of communication is non-verbal. It’s how you say it. Angry, sorry, happy, sad, bored, suspicious, cunning, honest. And this is the part you interpret with your feelings, not your brain. It’s intuitive.

So three-quarters of our communication is the non-logical part. The intuitive, common sense part. The spirit of the law, not the letter of the law. Einstein said two things I like a lot.He said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

And he also said, “We will not get any major insights by gradual, incremental logic. First we must make the intuitive leap, then we must build a bridge of logic back to where we started.”

So logic comes after the creative leap, not before. As David Hume said, “Reason alone is motivationally inert.”

Semiotics v Reality

Dave Trott — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:46:00 GMT

When I first went to Singapore, I went out one morning looking for a local café.

In Singapore, blocks of flats are built on massive concrete stilts with open areas underneath. Children play in these areas. The locals use them to hang their washing out.

But under this particular block some enterprising local had started a little café. There were several tables around, with lots of stools around them. On the tables were bowls of fruit. All very neat and clean.

They’d even hung some curtains, to separate off the kitchen. They didn’t have any customers and I couldn’t see anyone serving.

So I sat down and waited. I thought I’d have a local coffee. I waited quite a while, no one came.

Then I noticed someone peeking at me from around a corner. As soon as I saw them they ducked back.

After a while someone else was peeping at me from another corner. When they saw me looking they ducked back.

This went on for a while.

Eventually I thought I should look for someone to order a coffee from. So I got up and went over to where the kitchen area was.

I pulled the curtain aside and looked in. There wasn’t anyone in there either.

All there was a counter about 7 feet long, 2 feet wide, 2 feet deep. It was set up on trestles and draped with a tapestry.

I thought that’s a strange counter. Why did it need to be so deep? And where was the tea urn, or coffee-making machine?

Gradually it dawned on me. It wasn’t a counter. It was a coffin.

There was a dead body inside.

I’d walked into the preparations for a wake. So I gradually backed out and left.

The locals wouldn’t come and tell me because they didn’t speak English. And they couldn’t understand why an Ang Mo (white man) would come and sit at a Chinese wake.

I couldn’t work out why they didn’t have any signs around to tell anyone that it was a wake. Obviously they didn’t think they needed to do that.

In their world, everyone knew it was a wake. They’d never encounter anyone who didn’t know what a wake looked like. Their semiotics were ingrained.

Why would you need a sign for something everyone knew?

But my semiotics were ingrained too. And they were different, to me it was a café. It had tables, chairs, fruit, everything ready for customers.

See semiotics is just another word for a language. An accepted system of signs and symbols for communicating.

Different semiotics needn’t be a problem if you keep separate systems of semiotics, separate.

But it is a problem if you’re in the communications business.

I recently did a recording and dub for a commercial. When the final mix was ready the engineer played it back and it sounded great.

I asked him if he could play it back over small, crappy speakers. Because everything sounds great over massive studio speakers. But the reality is it’ll never be heard that way.

So he played it back, and I said I thought the sound effects were louder in the gaps between the VO.

He said, “Yes, they sound louder but actually they’re not.” I said, yes but they do sound louder.

He said, “They only sound louder because there’s no VO at that point. Actually they’re the same level.”

I said, yes but they still sound louder.

He said, “Look, I can show you on the dials they’re not.”

I said, yes, but that’s kind of irrelevant if they sound louder.

He said, “Well I can lower them if you like.”

And he did, but he wasn’t happy about it.

Because in his world, what it says on the dials is the reality. And I was being unreasonable.

But in my world what the ordinary person’s brain thinks it hears is the reality. That’s the first thing we have to recognise about our business.

There are two realities, two sets of semiotics. The professionals and the consumers.

And we need to decide who we’re actually producing ads for. Are we doing ads for the respect of our peers, or for the public? For awards, or people in the street.

Sometimes they’re the same thing, but a lot of times they’re not.

Then which way do we go? Do we believe what it says on the dial? Or do we believe what we hear?

Nobody's Perfect

Dave Trott — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:54:00 GMT

(I was going to rewrite this article, pull bits out, précis it.

But it’s actually so good, I think I should just print the whole thing.

It’s written by Al Ries who, along with Jack Trout, wrote one of my favourite books ‘Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind”.

This article is written in response to a book that was apparently very critical about Bill Bernbach.)

Recognizing Good Ideas Can Be More Important than Creativity

by Al Ries  Published: July 06, 2009

“Nobody’s perfect” is the title of Doris Willens' new book on Bill Bernbach and the golden age of advertising.

And just to make sure you get the point of the title, the book explores every imperfection she could find in the career of perhaps the most famous person in the history of advertising.

Fair enough. Nobody's perfect. But I think she failed to stress the essence of Bernbach's genius which, in my opinion, was his incredible ability to recognize a good idea. (Willens' book is particularly interesting since I knew many of the people she writes about. Our agency at the time shared the Uniroyal account with Doyle Dane Bernbach, although we had by far the smaller share.)

In spite of Doris Willens' many negative comments about Bill Bernbach, I think he was a true advertising genius.

One example from Willens' book: "From Helmut Krone's wastepaper basket, Bernbach fished wads of crumpled papers and beamed upon spreading open a sheet with the words, "We're only No. 2. So we try harder." (That was the genesis of the Avis campaign, No. 10 on Ad Age's list of the top 100 advertising campaigns of the 20th century.)

Another example: Future Hall of Fame art director Bill Taubin and copywriter David Reider discovered that Israeli airline El Al made all its flights at night. So they took the idea, "The only fly-by-night airline," to Bill Bernbach for his approval.

"Are you kidding?" End of meeting.

Sorting the good from the bad In the course of developing a campaign, advertising people usually dream up lots of ideas, some good and some bad. But no one had the ability to sort the good from the bad like Bernbach. It's a trait that's extremely rare.

How rare? You only have to watch a dozen TV commercials or leaf through a dozen magazine ads to figure that one out.

Most advertising is mediocre at best. And yet every advertisement was approved by someone at some company somewhere in the world. Why didn't the people who approved these mediocre advertisements demand to see "something better?"

The truth is, they thought the ads were good. Actually it's worse. Based on my personal experience in working with advertising people, I believe that most of them thought their advertisements were "great."

The advertising industry worships the creative process. At Cannes and at countless other places, the industry lavishes praise on its creative folks, the people who think up these wonderful ads.

But it's a rare individual who is good at recognizing the power of an idea once it is created.

You lose your objectivity once you create an idea, especially an idea in which you have invested a lot of emotional energy. Every creative person needs a Bill Bernbach, a sounding board to bounce ideas off of.

The difficulty of judging In my opinion, there are far more people who are good at coming up with great advertising ideas than there are people who are good at recognizing great ideas created by others.

In the history of the advertising industry, there were far more David Ogilvys, Hal Rineys and Shirley Polykoffs than there were Bill Bernbachs. Far more.

Why is it so difficult to judge the potential effectiveness of a proposed advertisement? I believe most people tend to make their judgments against a background of "accepted standards," or conventional wisdom.

Take Doyle Dane Bernbach's Volkswagen campaign, which was launched in 1959 with the famous "Think small" advertisement. (According to Advertising Age, the No. 1 campaign of the 20th century.) If there was one ad that marked the start of the golden era of advertising, "Think small" was the one.

But how did the '60s differ from the '50s? I recently analyzed 146 automobile advertisements from the 1950s and compared them with the Volkswagen ad.

Almost all of the 1950s auto ads (137 advertisements, or 94%) showed people in the ads. How else was a creative director going to demonstrate the pleasure that car buyers might feel about their new acquisitions?

Almost all of them (135 advertisements, or 92%) used artwork, not photography. How else was a creative director going to make the cars look long and low and beautiful?

Most of them (102, or 70%) used multiple illustrations. Some single-page advertisements had as many as eight separate illustrations. How else was a creative director going to communicate all of the car's exciting features except by using a number of different illustrations?

Almost all the ads were in color with hand-lettered headlines, big illustrations and large logotypes. How else was a creative director going to communicate the excitement of buying a new car?

Some typical automobile headlines from the 1950s:

Buick: "You can make your 'someday' come true now."

Cadillac: "Maybe this will be the year."

Oldsmobile: "You've got to drive it to believe it!"

Chevrolet: "Filled with grace and great new things."

Now compare these ads with "Think small." The Volkswagen ad was in black and white with a small illustration, lots of white space and a headline totally lacking in news value. Everybody knew that Beetles were small cars.

At the time the ad ran, Volkswagen had been in the American market for nine years, had sold more than 350,000 vehicles and had generated a lot of favorable publicity.

Looking back In retrospect, it's easy to see that the difference between the 1950s automobile ads and the 1960s Volkswagen ads. It's the difference between complexity and simplicity, between artificiality and realism.

But why didn't the creative directors of the 1950s value simplicity and realism? Because it's exceptionally hard to go against accepted wisdom. That wasn't the way advertising was done in that decade -- especially automobile advertising.

People don't want to be different. They want to be better. Clients want advertising à la mode. And most creative directors want the same thing. They want advertising "in the fashion" of the times, only better.

That's why it's hard to recognize a great advertising idea. It doesn't look right because it goes against accepted wisdom.

I remember a new-business presentation we made to a large account a number of years ago. The company's CEO dismissed us by saying: "Your ads have big pictures and this is the era of long copy."

Bernbach never believed in à la mode advertising. His creative philosophy was outlined in a guide he once wrote:

"Merely to let your imagination run riot, to dream unrelated dreams, to indulge in graphic acrobatics and verbal gymnastics is not being creative. The creative person has harnessed his imagination. He has disciplined it so that every thought, every idea, every line he draws, every light and shadow in every photograph he takes, makes more vivid, more believable, more persuasive the original theme or product advantage he has decided he must convey."

Now I wonder what he might have said about the Press Grand Prix winner at Cannes this year, a Wrangler advertisement with an illustration of a woman lying in a pool of water pretending to be a crocodile and the headline: "We are animals."

"Are you kidding?"

Use your loaf

Dave Trott — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:05:00 GMT

We were on holiday in Umbria, and we were driving to a medieval, hilltop city called Cortona. So we put it into the SatNav and followed the directions.

The SatNav got us to Cortona okay, but I wasn’t sure about the route. It was taking us to the heart of the city.

The streets were getting narrower and narrower. Something didn’t seem right.

But the SatNav was the expert, and it said straight ahead. So we kept going.

Up tiny little ancient cobblestone tracks built centuries before cars. Still the SatNav said keep going.

The roads changed from streets to alleys. The alleys changed into narrow paths, I had to pull the wing mirrors in.

The SatNav said straight ahead. Eventually I stopped.

Cathy said, “Carry on, the TomTom says straight ahead.” I said, “Cath, that’s medieval steps in front. We can’t drive down that unless you want to do a remake of The Italian Job.”

And we had to carefully and slowly reverse all the way back. We went the wrong way because what I had done was to totally put my trust in an expert: the TomTom. And switch off my common sense.

That’s what we all do.

Steve Henry wrote the Holsten Pils campaign using the ‘Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid’ technique.

We wanted a young, alternative comedian to intercut with the old footage of dead film stars. As if they were both talking about Holsten Pils.

Steve had found a pretty-much unknown comedian that he thought was great. A Scottish guy called Robbie Coltrane.

So we shot the test films and Steve was right, he was great. The only problem was that Robbie Coltrane was fat. And all the experts know you don’t use fat people in beer ads. Because, if you do, people will work out beer makes you fat. And they won’t buy our beer.

But here’s an unusual thought. What if beer drinkers already know that beer makes you fat? What if it’s not a secret?

Every night they go to the pub and drink a lot of beer. With their friends. So they’re probably already fat. And the friends they drink a lot of beer with are probably fat too. And they don’t care. Because they’re having a good time.

The Pareto principle states that a minority of your consumers account for the majority of your sales. So it obviously makes sense to target these people.

This applies particularly to the beer market. We’re not selling beer to ladies who care about their figures. We’re selling it to blokes, who care about football and beer, and cars and beer, and page 3 birds and beer.

They’ve already confronted the inevitability of their beer-belly and decided to carry on drinking beer. So the job of the advertising isn’t to stop them finding out that beer isn’t a diet product.

The job of advertising isn’t even to get them to drink more beer. The job of the advertising is to let them drink beer if they want to. But get them to switch to our beer.

In which case a really funny, preferably unknown, comedian is what we’re looking for. The sort of bloke you’d like to go for a beer with. Robbie Coltrane in fact.

But the experts couldn’t be persuaded. They said you didn’t have fat people in beer advertising and that was that.

So we had to look for a slim, good-looking replacement. Eventually we compromised on Griff Rhys Jones instead.

He was well known, and he was better looking, but most importantly he was thin.

So no one would know that beer makes you fat. What would have happened if we'd used Robbie instead of Griff? Would we have sold more beer or less?

We'll never know.

Luckily we had experts to advise us. They're called experts because they've learned the rules.

And you never break the rules. No matter what common-sense says.

The facts may not be the facts

Dave Trott — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:09:00 GMT

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

Dave Trott — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:15:00 GMT

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

Dave Trott — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:00:00 GMT

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?

Dave Trott — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:55:00 GMT

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

Dave Trott — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:31:00 GMT

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

Dave Trott — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:25:00 GMT

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

Dave Trott — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:00:00 GMT

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?

Dave Trott — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:54:00 GMT

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

Dave Trott — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:52:00 GMT

Mel Brookes was a very funny stand-up comedian.

He was about to direct his first feature film and he was worried that the film crew wouldn’t take him seriously.

Film crews are notorious for taking the piss.

They knew he wasn’t a real director.

They all had tons more experience on film sets than he did.

Anyway, he’d probably be crap at it.

So there was no point in putting a lot of effort in.

They’d just use his inexperience as an excuse to goof off.

Read the paper, sleep, go to the cafe.

They could always blag him with some technical jargon.

So the first day of the shoot all the crew arrived a bit late.

Sat around and started to kill time.

Mel Brooks came on the set and started to tell them where he wanted the lights and the cameras.

The crew slowly shuffled over in a half-arsed attempt to look like they were working.

Not much was getting done.

After about twenty minutes Mel Brookes shouted across the film set to one particular guy sitting in a chair.

He shouted out to him, “Hey you, you lazy ***, I’ve been watching you! You’re fired! Get the *** offa my set!”

Everyone stood stock still.

The guy pleaded, “Hey Mel, I’m working. You probably just don’t realise what I’m doing is all.”

Now the film crew were silent, listening to every word.

Mel Brooks shouted back, “All I need to know is you’re goofing off.

I know I don’t need you or anyone else goofing off on my set. Now get outa here.”

The guy threatened, “Mr Brooks, you’re making a big mistake. You can’t fire me, I’m in the union.”

Mel Brooks shouted, “So go call your union. You think you’ll ever get another job on a movie set if you do that? Meanwhile get the *** offa my movie before I call security to throw you off.”

The guy looked around to see if anyone would side with him against the director.

Everyone looked at the floor.

Eventually he shrugged and gave up.

He grabbed his bag and trudged off the set with his head down.

No one moved until he shut the door behind him.

Then, all at once, everyone snapped into action.

The crew began moving film cameras, erecting lights, organising props, painting the set.

The film studio became a hive of activity.

Suddenly everyone realised that Mel Brooks was serious.

That he’d actually fire them for goofing off.

They thought he was just a comedian.

Man, now they knew they’d better watch their arses.

No one wanted to get fired.

And, for the rest of the shoot, the crew worked their socks off.

Everything Mel Brooks wanted done was done immediately.

Everyone was on time and efficient.

Mel Brooks got his movie finished, on-time and on-budget.

And it was a good movie.

What no one knew was that the guy Mel fired was actually an actor.

Mel had hired the guy before the shoot had started.

He paid him for the part, like any acting job.

He said he had to act like one of the crew, and when he got fired he had to be upset.

The guy had done his job well, and the crew never knew.

But that really got their attention

Now they knew what they’d taken for granted could suddenly be taken away.

And that stopped them being complacent.

That gave them a shot of adrenalin.

A lot more energy.

It made them appreciate what they had, and realise hey didn’t want to lose it.

So they began to take their job more seriously.

And they worked hard.

And they enjoyed it.

And by the end of the shoot, most of them wanted to work with Mel again.

They even became friends, and part of his regular crew.

Because when you stop taking your job for granted is when you realise how lucky you are to have it.

You work to keep it, you work to do it well.

So you appreciate it more, so you enjoy it more.

Nothing wrong with a little bit of fear to make you appreciate what you’ve got.

Give it back to the people

Dave Trott — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 23:29:00 GMT

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

Dave Trott — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:19:00 GMT

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.