Dave Trott’s Blog

What chance do those of us who aren’t talented stand against those who are?

Is it ever possible for ordinary people to beat the gifted?

In my experience, yes.

Talented people tend to be complacent, and consequently lazy.

All you have to actually do is work harder.

So the issue becomes, where do you get the energy to work harder from?

Some people get it artificially: coke or speed for instance.

Such a chemical dump into the bloodstream will certainly give you energy.

But it is illegal and unhealthy in the long term.

So is there any chemical dump into the bloodstream that isn’t illegal or unhealthy?

Well yes actually, adrenalin.

Great, but where do you get it?

The answer is fear.

If you learn how to make yourself frightened, you can turn on the adrenalin tap.

This will give you a massive dump of energy into your bloodstream.

The energy to stay at your desk writing ads when everyone else is over the pub.

The energy to do what you know you ought to do, but don’t want to do.

The energy to put short term fun on the back burner, and long term career on the front burner.

The trick of course, is to control the fear.

Make sure you’ve got it, and it hasn’t got you.

Choose to be frightened rather than resisting being frightened.

It’s a great source of energy.

Of course most people will tell you the opposite.

Don’t be afraid, it’s unproductive.

In my experience these are the people who are over the pub when they could be working.

In my experience these are the losers.

People who are frightened of fear.

Because fear is the enemy of laziness.

And talented people have learnt that they are better.

So they don’t have to try so hard.

They’ve learned they can afford to be lazy.

And that’s where they’re vulnerable.

So don’t resist fear, learn how to generate it.

Make fear your friend.

Fear generates energy.

And energy will always beat talent in the long run.

Ever wonder where advertising bullshit comes from?

Is it necessary, does it serve a purpose?

I always thought it was just pretentious drivel designed to dress up a lack of thinking.

I finally understood the purpose of it when we did a pitch to a big supermarket chain.

I was just sitting there listening while the account man did all the talking.

At one point he said to the client, “The problem is that, in order to increase stock-turn, you need to optimise your on-shelf margins.”

The client said “Exactly. You’ve understood my problem perfectly.”

And we walked out with the account.

When we got to the car I said to the account man, “What did you mean: in order to increase stock-turn you’ve got to optimise your on-shelf margins?”

The account man said, “It’s simple: if he can sell things cheaper people will buy more.”

I said, “Why didn’t you just say that?”

He said “Because the client would have thought I knew nothing about marketing.”

Then I got it.

 He can’t just say to a client “Look squire, if you make things cheaper people will buy more.”

And I can’t say, in a TV commercial, “Ladies. In order to increase stock-turn we’ve optimised our on-shelf margins.”

Neither communication would work with our different target markets.

For creatives, our market is the consumer.

For account men, their market is clients.

We have to take complicated things and make them simple.

They have to take simple things and make them complicated.

The problem is, of course, when account men or planners have to brief creatives

The discussion last week on LunarBBDO blog and in Campaign was whether advertising increases consumption, or merely shifts it from one place to another.

I thought we were discussing brand share versus market growth, but actually they were discussing whether advertising was responsible for global warming by encouraging unnecessary consumption.

It’s an interesting question, but actually the answer is the other way around.

The need to fuel unnecessary consumption created advertising in the first place.

Nowadays we believe the consumer society always existed, but it isn’t so.

Until the 1920s, less that 5% of the population could afford to buy more than they needed.

The idea that you buy something that you didn’t need, but wanted, didn’t exist for ordinary people.

You had one pair of shoes, and you would get them repaired until they fell apart.

When they wore out you bought another pair, and repeated the process.

The idea that you would have more shoes than you needed wasn’t on the radar.

There were no ‘consumers’, just people who needed things.

The only things you’d buy that you didn’t actually need were beer and cigarettes.

And, as these were addictive, most people probably did actually need them.

The person generally credited with creating the consumer society was Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew.

At the end of World War One, American industry was producing much more than was actually being bought.

So they needed to find an outlet for this excess production.

Edward Bernays began using his uncle’s techniques to educate people to want things they didn’t actually need.

He made crude cinema commercials using Eleanor Roosevelt to explain to women why they should have more than one pair of shoes.

How their husband must be getting bored seeing them in the same dress all the time.

How there was a good reason you should buy more than you could wear every day.

In the beginning this behaviour needed a logical explanation to jump start it.

A purely emotional appeal would have just been frivolous, you needed a real reason to part with the housekeeping money.

As the habit took hold, it didn’t need justifying anymore.

As women began working and earning money emotional appeal became more acceptable, and logic was dropped.

(Brand versus Product)

Increased consumption meant more workers were needed, and everyone had more money, fuelling the whole cycle.

(See Adam Smith, also Reaganomics and Thatcherism)

Everyone accepted they should spend their money on things they wanted, not just on things they needed.

Nowadays it’s accepted that people buy primarily what they want, without relevance to need.

In fact, in today’s marketing parlance, something bought purely because you need it, is called a “distress purchase”.

So, like the design industry, the fashion industry, the music industry, the film industry, technology and mass communication, advertising is just a symptom of the consumer society.

Not the cause.

MAKE YOUR OWN RULES

A couple of years back Nick Wray got an all-girl student team in here on 2 week’s placement (Anna and Elaine).

I never expect much out of placement teams, but these girls were good.

They worked so hard that inside the 2 weeks they had work actually running.

So we offered them another two weeks.

They worked so hard again, they got even more work running.

So we offered them another fortnight’s placement.

By this time they even had TV running.

So we offered them another two weeks.

The girls said no.

They said they needed a job.

So they were leaving to get a placement somewhere else.

And they’d keep trying different placements until they eventually got a job.

Gordon and I talked it over and realised we couldn’t let them go.

They were better than some of the teams we had working here.

But we didn’t have the room or the money to hire them.

So we fired one of the teams that was here and gave the girls their job.

English people think that’s cruel.

But Americans don’t.

They think it’s more cruel to keep someone in a job even though they can’t do it, while someone who can do it is walking the streets, unemployed.

I think the lesson is simple.

Don’t sit around waiting for something to happen.

Make it happen.

Don’t wait for an opportunity.

Create the opportunity where there isn’t one.

Too many people today, from students on up, act as if we’re working in the civil service and have to follow the rules.

They act as if we have to wait for permission.

How dull is that?

STYLE v DESIGN

What can we learn from the past?

Apparently nothing.

It’s gone so it can’t be any good.

It must be 10, 15, even (gosh) 20 years ago.

How can it be of any use at all?

Our business is obsessed with the new.

It can’t distinguish between change and improvement.

New = Good. Old = Bad.

So everything new is automatically better than everything old?

Well let’s see if that’s true.

Is Damian Hirst automatically better than Picasso?

Is James Blunt automatically better than Elvis?

Is Lewis Hamilton automatically better than Jackie Stewart?

Is Andy Murray automatically better than John MacEnroe?

New is just the ground claimed by people who aren’t good enough to win by being better.

New is just a justification for dull being done in a different way.

So what can anyone learn from the past?

Tracey Emin recently wrote a 4 page article for The Independent about what she’d learned from renaissance painters: Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Raphael, and Titian.

Mike Tyson “The Baddest Man On The Planet”, would constantly play films of the man he learned most from: Jack Dempsey, world champion in the 1920s.

Paul Gascoigne used to study the moves of Johann Cruyff to learn things none of his contemporaries could teach him.

Vivienne Westwood recently said on TV she still learns from studying Coco Channel.

These people don’t just compete with whatever level of talent is around at present.

They compete with, and learn from, the best there’s ever been.

In our business that would be John Webster, Paul Arden, Bill Bernbach, Helmut Krone, etc.

When did you last meet an advertising student who’d even heard of Bill Bernbach?

What makes our business more trivial than any other form of creativity is that we aren’t trying to build on what went before.

We’re just anxious to get to the latest technological gimmick before anyone else.

I think this attitude cheapens what we do.

We confuse being first with creativity.

We confuse ‘new’ with ‘better’.

Isaac Newton said, “If I have done anything it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Oops sorry.

Newton’s dead, he can’t be any good.