Dave Trott’s Blog

Years back, when I was a young writer at BMP, John Webster said, “The difference between you and me is that you’re a gifted amateur and I’m a professional.”

I asked him what that meant.

He said, “At the end of the day, you’ll come out of the office with something brilliant or nothing. I’ll come out of the office with something brilliant, or something usable.”

When John said that it was like a light going on in my head.

I got what he meant.

This isn’t art, this is business.

At it’s best it should be a beautiful and inspiring business.

But it is a business.

The previous time I had a light go off in my head was at art school.

I’d moved from Fine Art to Graphic Design because I couldn’t stand the subjectivity of the art establishment.

The only way you knew if anything was any good was if the little clique of art critics said it was good.

Then it was recognised as good by everyone else.

I hated that.

At art school in New York I discovered The Bauhaus.

Their guiding principle was Form Follows Function.

Get that: Form Follows Function.

You can tell how good a piece of design is by how well it does the job it’s supposed to do.

It’s not just a subjective collection of pretty shapes to please a bunch of influential critics.

This formula transferred perfectly to the job we do in advertising.

You could bypass the little clique of so-called experts.

You could go straight to the 55 million consumers in the streets and houses of the UK.

Did what we did work for them?

Did they repeat your strapline, tell someone about your joke, sing your song, buy your soundtrack, or use your mnemonic in conversation?

Because if they did, every time they did it was a free OTS.

Media you weren’t paying for.

And all our arguments could be settled objectively, by reason and logic against measurable targets.

Not just by the subjective feelings of a small, vocal, influential group.

Of course, having said that, the criteria differ for some of us.

For a lot of us the target isn’t the 55 million consumers in the street.

It’s the awards juries.

The target isn’t free media, or increased sales, or anything to do with the world outside advertising.

The target is awards.

Because, if you work for an international conglomerate, you have to stand up and present your agency’s work against all the other agencies from all over the world.

And how your performance will be measured is by how many awards you’ve won.

The person who’s won the most awards must be the best ECD, right?

Isn’t that why everyone cares about Cannes?

For me this takes what we do right back to the dictatorship of a critical elite that exists in the fine art world.

But that’s just me.

I don’t have to satisfy the board at an international conglomerate.

For me, I just have to satisfy a milkman in Leeds, a housewife in Newcastle, and a schoolboy in London.

That’s another thing I learnt from John Webster. 

The most important sentence on the brief is never written on the brief.

The most important sentence on the brief should always be, “This advertising must stand out, it must be noticed.”

That’s what we do.

If we don’t do that what do we do?

It should be written at the top of every brief, but it’s never written on any brief.

It should be written on every brief because unless it’s noticed there’s no point in spending your money.

No one notices it.

Nothing can happen.

The money’s wasted.

(And the figures show that 90% of the money spent on advertising is wasted, because it’s neither noticed nor remembered.)

Yet everyone assumes that just because you’ve done an ad it will be noticed,

So everyone’s attention is focused on the details of the ad.

The size of the logo, the position of the pack, the brand values, etc.

Is the ad pretty enough, witty enough, stylish enough, will it win an award?

No one’s attention is focused on the really big issue.

Well anyone even notice it?

Will it stand out?

Is it different?

Because the environments our advertising is judged in aren’t the environments they have to work in.

Account men and clients judge them in boardrooms.

Creative people judge them on awards juries.

In these forums the person presenting says something like,

“First I’m going to show the advert.

Then we’ll discuss it.

Okay, blinds drawn, everybody quiet.

Ready?

Here we go.”

Then everyone concentrates on the press ad or the commercial, and debates it afterwards.

There is no context.

No interruption.

No extraneous noise.

Nothing to distract you from giving it 100% of your attention.

Now contrast that with the actual environment it has to work in.

If it’s a print ad it may be folded over while standing on a crowded tube train in rush hour with someone’s armpit in your face.

Or flicked past while idly chatting to a friend in Café Nero.

If it’s a commercial it comes on in the middle of a programme.

Good excuse for you to leave the TV set to go and make a snack or do some texting.

If it’s online, it pops up while you’re looking for something else, so it’s just part of the general onscreen clutter, so you brush it aside.

The rules are always the same.

Unless you get noticed, nothing can happen.

Unless you’re different, you won’t get noticed.

Now of course, different on its own isn’t enough.

But without it, you haven’t got anything.

If you can’t be different to your environment you become just part of the wallpaper.

So being different is the first and most important job.

The sine qua non.

I was explaining this one night to a group of students.

On put his hand up and said,

“Yeah, but being different’s been done hasn’t it?”

You see the problem.

VISIBLE v RELEVANT

 Years ago, when I worked at Boase Massimi Pollitt, I had a conversation with Martin Boase about what made BMP different to other agencies.

Martin said it was the work.

Some agencies could do work that was strategically sound, but creatively dull.

(RELEVANT - INVISIBLE)

On the other end of the scale, some agencies did work that was strategically unsound, but creatively exciting.

(visible – irrelevant)

What made BMP different, was that we delivered work that was both strategically sound and creatively exciting.

(RELEVANT and VISIBLE)

My initial reaction to this was, “Yeah, and I bet every agency all over the world claims to do the same thing.”

Obviously that’s what anyone with half-a-brain would want.

So the real question is: if that’s what everyone wants, how come 90% of advertising is strategically unsound and creatively dull?

(INVISIBLE and IRRELEVANT)

Here’s what I think.

We have deadlines, we have budgets, we have disagreements.

As the airdate/ pitch date/ presentation date looms, it becomes apparent that we can’t have the perfect solution.

(RELEVANT and VISIBLE)

If we keep waiting for it to turn up, we aren’t going to have anything.

So we have to choose.

We have to choose between being relevant or being visible.

Now in that situation different interests get polarised.

Account-handling, Planning, Clients, will always drag it towards relevant.

Whatever conventional thinking makes sense in their market, based on the data and market research, they have available.

(So, whether they admit or not, they will drag it towards RELEVANT – INVISIBLE.)

The creative department will always drag it towards whatever they think is most likely to win an award, or at least not embarrass them, regardless of whether it sells or not.

(So, whether they admit it or not, they will always drag it towards VISIBLE – IRRELEVANT)

We all have to choose between these two alternatives.

And of course we don’t want to, and so we pretend we don’t have to. But, if we don’t choose, the choice gets made for us.

So, if you accept that you have to choose.

Which should you choose?

Personally, as in most things, I defer to Bill Bernbach.

He said, “If no one notices your advertising, everything else is academic.”

So, given that, I would choose VISIBLE – IRRELEVANT.

At least if people notice your advertising there’s a chance of something happening.

If no one notices your advertising, there’s absolutely no chance of anything happening at all.

AUTO-PILOTS AREN’T CREATIVE

What do Buddha and Bill Bernbach have in common?

See if you can notice a similarity in these two stories.

Thousands of years ago, Buddha said what was keeping people’s minds enslaved was worshipping wooden idols on top of alters.

You can’t think for yourself while you’re letting someone else do your thinking for you.

All you can do is try to copy what they thought.

Buddha said people should free their minds..

They couldn’t become enlightened until they stop worshipping idols.

The people knew Buddha was a great and wise man.

In fact, they thought that Buddha was so enlightened that maybe he was a god.

A man like that should be listened to and obeyed.

So they made statues of Buddha.

And put them on alters.

And worshipped them.

Do you get the feeling, as I do, that they missed the point of what Buddha was saying?

Many years later Bill Bernbach took a look around advertising and saw people worshipping conventional thinking.

All the rules that produced the same old dull, boring, hard-sell advertising.

He said we should change it, free our minds up to be more creative.

To question the way everything had been done.

To do things differently.

One of the first things he questioned was why the copywriters sat on a separate floor to the art department.

He thought he could put art-assistants together with copywriters.

To make a two-person creative unit, a ‘team’.

It had never been done before, and it worked really well.

Gradually everyone copied it.

And it stopped being unusual and different.

It became conventional thinking for the advertising industry.

Every advertising agency creative department in the world is now made up of ‘teams’.

In fact nowadays, you can’t get a job unless you’re part of a ‘team’.

Art schools put their students into ‘teams’ before they even let them graduate.

Their end-of-degree shows are done in ‘teams’.

Last week a student told me that an agency had said they wouldn’t even see his portfolio unless he could find a partner and become part of a team.

Do you get the feeling, as I do, that they’ve missed the point of what Bill Bernbach was saying?

STUDENTS

I did an all-day-live-blog at ScampBlog last week.

In case you missed it, here’s the link:

http://scampblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/dave-trott-live-chat-all-day.html

One of the most contentious exchanges was about students.

I said students were a waste of space, and I had no time for them.

Naturally this didn’t go down too well.

Someone called ‘Borat’ in particular thought I was just forming my low opinion of students on the low quality of students I’d seen.

Au contraire.

I have a low opinion of people who think of themselves as students.

The problem with students is that they haven’t yet made the change in their head to being professionals.

Consequently they behave pretty much the way they did at college.

They want to do one ad then celebrate: get drunk and party until next week’s brief comes in.

That’s what they learned at college.

Do one ad, get patted on the back, then sleep and party until next week’s ad is due.

Students get their first job and straight away they relax.

Once they’ve got a job they think they can put their feet up, they’re safe for 3 years just like college.

Then after a short while of doing that the agency wonders why they’re paying them, so they get fired.

And, because they didn’t get any work out, they now get a job at a not-so-good agency.

And they behave the same as before.

After several jobs dodging work and partying, it occurs to them that they’ve now been out of college 3 or 4 years, and none of the work they’ve done is anything they’re proud of.

In fact they’ve still got the book of roughs they left college with, plus one or two embarrassing press ads that actually ran.

Now they panic.

Now they can see their life stretching out ahead of them as bleak and dull, while other people do great ads at good agencies.

Now they are desperate.

Now they try to put a new book together made up of all the good ideas that they’ll never get out of the agency they’re at.

Now they realise what all that laziness and fun has cost them.

Now is the time to hire them.

Now they aren’t students anymore.

Now they are art directors and writers desperate to do good work.

Now they are begging for a chance.

Now they want to work for themselves, not the agency.

Now they are greedy for work.

This is their last chance.

If you give them a job now you are throwing them a lifeline.

They are in a hurry to make up for all the time they wasted.

Every brief you give them is like a present.

These people have now discovered the reason why they should work.

They’ve also discovered the energy that it takes to do good ads, and the fun it is doing them.

They will easily bury anyone for energy and enthusiasm.

They will work evenings and weekends because they are doing it for themselves, not the agency.

They will do their own work, then take anyone else’s work and do that too.

They lift the whole energy level of the entire agency.

People like this are a pleasure to have around, they remind everyone of how great our job is and why we do it.

And that’s why I don’t hire students.