Dave Trott’s Blog

One of my heroes is Ed McCabe.

I doubt if very many people reading this will even know who he is.

Given that, from the various advertising blogs, you’d think the only thing that mattered to advertising ‘creatives’ was whether an ad won anything at this year’s Cannes awards.

Ed McCabe said one of the most important things I ever heard about advertising effectiveness.

AN AD THAT DOESN’T CAUSE A RUCKUS IS A LOUSY AD.

I’M CONSTANTLY IN TROUBLE AND I THINK THAT’S PROOF OF MY WORTH.

Think about it.

If your ad works it has to piss someone off.

Certainly your competitors, who will be losing sales to you.

If your ad is doing its job, they should be hurting.

If it’s really good they’ll be trying to get it banned.

They’ll be complaining to the BACC or the ASA.

The people whose job it is to maintain the status quo.

The people who enforce the set of rules that are designed for the specific purpose of ensuring no one gets upset.

Designed to stop anyone rocking the boat.

But to get noticed you have to be different.

And the rules are designed to stop you being different.

So to be different you have to break the rules.

Which means the BACC and/or ASA will get upset.

Given your job is to create awareness above-and-beyond your client’s media spend you have to get people talking about your ad.

That’s how you create free media.

You create controversy.

Your ad should  (in Ed McCabe’s terminology) create a ruckus.

If none of those things happen it means no one has been outraged.

Certainly not your competitors.

Because if your ad isn’t working, they won’t be upset by it.

They, like the rest of the population, probably haven’t even noticed it.

(After all, 90% of advertising goes unnoticed.)

Congratulations.

You managed to run an ad that no one objected to because no one noticed.

No one noticed so you didn’t get into trouble, well done.

John Cleese said, IT IS THE GOAL OF EVERY ENGLISHMAN TO GET TO HIS GRAVE UNEMBARRASED.

I think most of them work in advertising.

That’s why they only care about the awards.

They’re nice and safe.

And more important, they are proof that people approve of you.

Yesterday I read a quote by one of my heroes, George Lois.

“I don’t listen to the marketing guys, their ambitions are too small.

They just want to notch the sales up an inch or two.

I want to do ads that change the world.”

Here’s an illustration of what he meant by that.

Years ago, in New York, he had  a problem.

His account was Renault, and their biggest seller at that time was The Dauphine.

Every year, the dealers had to sell out all of last year’s models to make room for the new models to arrive.

The trouble is, no one really wants last year’s car, so they took months to shift.

Dealers would start off cutting $500 off, and end up cutting up to $1,500 off, just to get rid of them.

George Lois turned the whole thing around.

He thought “No one wants last year’s car, but everyone loves a bargain.”

So he bought a couple of tins of Band Aids and a pen-knife.

Then he went around the Renault dealers in New York putting a little tiny nick in the paintwork of each of the cars.

Somewhere out of sight and hard to find: under the wing or behind the bumper.

Then he put a Band Aid over the nick.

Then he ran an ad saying:

IF YOU CAN FIND THE NICK IN THE PAINTWORK OF A RENAULT DAUPHINE, WE’LL GIVE YOU $500 OFF.

The cars sold out before lunch on the day the ad ran.

People couldn’t believe they could get $500 off, just for spotting a little tiny nick in the paintwork.

George Lois didn’t depend on the brief to do his thinking for him.

He didn’t just run ads saying, $500 0FF RENAULT DAUPHINS.

He didn’t take the account man’s or the planner’s word for what the problem was.

They’re not creative.

We are.

If we can be bothered.

How does advertising work?

It works the same way as every other purchase decision.

Every purchase decision is a combination of  ‘desire’ and ‘permission’.

Without those two elements nothing happens.

If you want to buy something, but you can’t justify it in any way, you don’t buy it.

If you can justify buying something, but you don’t want it, you don’t buy it.

It’s that simple.

You’ve got to want something, and it’s got be okay for you to have it.

The ‘desire’ part is the right brain: the emotional part.

The ‘permission’ part is the left brain: the rational part.

The emotional side of your brain wants it.

The rational side of your brain says whether you can have it.

Think of the traditional car ad.

Big beautiful shot of a sexy looking car on the left hand page.

All the statistics on the right hand page (5 bearing crankshaft, 16 valve engine, double overhead-camshafts, ABS, SIPS, etc., etc.)

What makes your emotional side want the car is the big beautiful photo.

But your rational side won’t let you buy a car just on what it looks like.

So your rational side has to be reassured by the statistics on the other page.

Without the beautiful photo, your emotional side wouldn’t want the car.

Without the statistics as evidence, your rational side wouldn’t be happy to part with the money.

Now because not every purchase decision costs as much as a car, it’s not always as obvious as that.

It might be much more subtle and sophisticated.

But with everything, from a chocolate bar to perfume, there has to be desire, and there has to be permission.

And that’s not just true of advertising.

That’s true of every single decision you make in your life.

From the day you’re born until the day you die.

Desire, permission.

Advertising is the same as everything else.

I was at art school in New York, and one of the projects we were given was to advertise yourself.

Like everyone else I started by thinking what was different about me.

Then, once I’d got that sorted, I wrote some ads

Then thinking about the best media for it.

Then we all went along to class to present our ideas.

The two guys who used to teach our class were from Doyle Dane Bernbach, and Delehanty Kurnit & Geller, two of the hottest agencies in town.

As we were waiting they walked in with faces like death.

They sat with their heads in their hands.

They looked up at us with tears in their eyes.

They said, “There isn’t going to be a class tonight.”

They said, “We’ve just received this letter from the Dean.

The best person in the class has been killed in a car crash.

She was the person with the brightest future of her entire year, and now it’s all gone.

If there was anyone in this entire year who was going to make an impact, anyone who was going to be great, it was her.

And now she’s gone.”

They went on like that for about twenty minutes,

And then she walked in.

She’d been waiting outside the door, listening while they did her advertising for her.

When she walked in they were speechless.

They didn’t know whether to be relieved or hit her.

They were so angry they just walked out.

She knew that, in America, when anyone dies they get an automatic eulogy.

So she had the Dean write the letter about the car crash, to get her teachers to advertise her themselves.

When they calmed down, they repeated that story all over town.

They even carried the letter in their wallets to show advertising people all over New York.

She became so famous that, by the time she got out of art school, she could have walked into a job at pretty much any agency on Madison Avenue.

Now what I say is, if you need permission to be creative, you’re not really creative.

You’re safe.

When I first got to New York in 1967, I was a little mod from London.

London was racially pretty much totally white, and everyone aspired to be middle class.

I got off the subway train in Manhattan and there was a poster of a little smiling black boy tucking into a huge sandwich, with the headline YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE JEWISH TO LOVE LEVYS: REAL JEWISH RYE.

I couldn’t believe you could run a poster like that.

You certainly couldn’t have run it in London.

A black child eating your product.

The word ‘JEWISH’ in the headline.

I went round the corner and there was a poster of a Chinaman eating a huge sandwich with the same headline.

Further on there was a poster of an Irish policeman eating a sandwich with the same headline.

Then a Red Indian eating a sandwich, and again the same headline.

I’d never seen advertising like this.

Instead of choosing only the best looking, most aspirational white models to grace the product, Bernbach had picked ethnic types.

He said (without saying it):

“We all know New York has the biggest Jewish population of any city in the US.

We all know New Yorkers won’t settle for anything but the best.

We all know New York is a helluva lot more exciting than whatever town you’re from.

Well New Yorkers think Levys is the best Rye bread you can get.”

Instead of pretending New York was whites only, he’s celebrated the fact that New York was more ethnically diverse than any other city in America, if not the world.

He’d turned the whole thing on its head.

Suddenly, thanks largely to Bernbach, cities all over the world wanted to be as cool as New York.

Everyone was desperately trying to find ethnic minorities to put in their ads.

Racial differences became something to be celebrated, not hidden.

Plain racially dominant white culture became dull and boring.

Racial differences became cool and interesting.

And largely because of Bill Bernbach.

Levys wasn’t the only campaign like this he did, just the first one I saw when I got off the plane.

For me, Bernbach did more for ethnic diversity than any patronising political speech.

That’s a little more important than just putting up the sales of a product don’t you think?