In America, everyone knows Thomas Edison was a genius.

He is credited with inventing everything from the light bulb to the telephone.

What isn’t so well known is that he was actually an advertising genius.

One of the things he is credited with inventing is the electrical system we all use today.

In fact he didn’t.

Edison’s electrical system was DC (direct current).

Unfortunately for Edison, his main competitor had the AC system (alternating current).

The AC system was much more powerful than Edison’s DC system.

It looked as if the competition’s system would drive his out of business.

But Edison knew the mantra that should be tattooed on every advertising person that calls themselves creative.

“How do you turn a problem into an opportunity?”

At a dinner party he got talking to the Governor of New York.

He expressed a worry about the way the death penalty was administered, by hanging.

Edison felt this could go wrong and result in unnecessary suffering.

He suggested a more humane way: the electric chair.

It was fast, humane and foolproof.

He suggested his competitor’s powerful AC system was the perfect way to administer this.

The Governor was persuaded by the humanitarian argument.

The State of New York adopted the electric chair.

Soon after the first execution, Edison called a press conference with New York’s news media.

He said that the fact that the AC system was powering the electric chair was proof that it could be deadly in the home.

If families wanted a system for their houses that was safer, they were far better off using his own weaker DC system.

Particularly amongst parents this was a persuasive argument.

Edison’s DC system was adopted by many families.

It remained a competitor to the AC system for half a century.

Not because it was a great invention.

Because it was a great piece of selling.

I wrote recently that it’s difficult to be a writer in a foreign country.

An example happened to me last week.

I was at Hampstead tube, and the ticket collector had a new walkie-talkie.

He was obviously very proud of it.

He spoke into it loudly enough for us all to hear.

He said:

“Tango 1 calling Tango 2.

Tango 1 calling Tango 2.

Over.”

I heard a muffled voice reply something.

Then the ticket collector said testily into it:

“No Chris: you’re Tango 3, Terry’s Tango 2.”

I laughed to myself, and thought something that silly could only happen in this country. It makes you proud to be British.

Then I thought, why is that?

Why are we so proud of looking silly?

Germans or Spanish or Chinese would die before they’d let anyone see them looking silly.

We revel in it.

Take the war in Afghanistan.

The British and American forces were involved in really heavy fighting with the Taliban.

The worst of the fighting was in and around the caves of Tora Bora.

The American forces dubbed them, ‘The Caves of Death’.

The British forces referred to them as, ‘Tora Bora Tomkinson’.

Later I read a report about the airborne tanker crews.

The American pilots were flying missions from carriers in The Gulf.

They didn’t have enough fuel to make the return trip unless they refuelled at night, 30,000 feet up, from British airborne tankers.

One American pilot said, “These guys flew missions that saved our lives. But when we linked up with them, they held signs up to the window saying, CASH ONLY, NO CHEQUES.

I don’t know, is that your humour?”

The same thing happened in World War 2.

It was 1940 and America wasn’t in the war.

France had just fallen and everyone knew Britain was next.

Ed Murrow, the famous American reporter, was doing a weekly radio broadcast back to the US from London.

He said,

“Sometimes it’s hard for an American to understand the British.

Today the whole of Europe has fallen to Nazi Germany.

Only the people of this small island are  left, on their own against a mighty war machine.

And yet as I went on the street this morning, the mood of the population seemed somehow lighter, more optimistic.

It didn’t make any sense.

Then I saw a newspaper seller with a placard in front of him that read, BRITAIN AND GERMANY IN THE FINAL.”

Kenny Dalglish was one of the best players in the country.

He was coming to the end of his playing career, but Liverpool wanted him to play a few more seasons.

So to hang onto him, they agreed to train him to be a manager while he played.

He became, in effect, a player-manager.

On TV,  one of the commentators asked him how he was getting on.

He said, “I’ll know I’ve got the team right when I can’t get on it.”

For me, being a creative director is like that.

You’re effectively a player-manager.

You’ll know the creative work is right, when you couldn’t have done it better.

You get promoted to creative director because of the quality of work you’ve done.

But you can’t do the work on every account.

So you’ve got to see which accounts you could have done better.

Then work on those.

Don’t just pick the plum accounts for yourself.

That won’t make the department better.

Give everyone else a chance first.

That is if you want to get the standard of the whole department up..

Tell your department to be prima donnas.

Not to be reasonable and do what the account men and planners want.

Not to do dull work purely to hold an account.

Tell them the only person entitled to do dull work to hold an account is the creative director.

The creatives shouldn’t do dull work unless you ask them directly yourself.

They should be selfish, but the creative director shouldn’t.

I see the CD as the big centre-forward, playing with his back to the opposition goal.

It’s his job to bring the ball down and lay it off to whichever striker’s in the best position to score.

The strikers’ job is to stick it in the net.

No excuses.

You need to know who can do great work, but is being stopped by the system.

And who can’t do great work, and is using the system as an excuse.

Then you can restock your department accordingly.

And build a department capable of better work.

You’ll know you’ve got the team right when you can’t get on it.

You could always spot where a copywriter trained.

People who’d been to university always wrote their copy with a pencil.

People who’d been to art School always used a typewriter.

Why is this?

I think it’s because university writers ‘hear’ copy.

While art school writers ‘see’ copy.

So a university writer is listening when they write.

To the flow of the words, the rhythm of the argument.

An art school writer is looking at what it looks like on the page.

Have I got the line breaks in the right place?

Are there any widows?

Where should the indents go?

A university writer isn’t interested in any of that.

What it looks like is the art director’s problem.

And yet the biggest influence on advertising writing wasn’t a copywriter.

It was an art director.

Helmut Krone. .

He did it on the very first Volkswagen ads.

Until then, all art directors used to see the ads as 3 elements:

Visual. Headline.  Copy.

That’s why the copy was just put in as ‘Greek’ (Lorem ipsum) on the layout.

It wasn’t important.

For most art directors this copy was just several grey blocks at the bottom of the ad.

For reasons of design, art directors got rid of ‘widows’ and ‘indents’.

(Sentences which began or ended in the middle of a line, so leaving white space.)

They thought it was graphically cleaner, and more attractive.

But Helmut Krone didn’t think anyone would want to read an impenetrable block.

So he began cutting spaces into the copy, to open it up.

The very spaces the other art directors were trying to get rid of.

Then he  said to the writer Julian Koenig, “Can you write copy to fit this?”

Koenig said, “I can, but some of the sentences will be just one word long.”

Krone said, “That’s okay.”

He wasn’t interested in grammatical correctness.

He was interested in opening it up so it looked inviting to read.

And so a whole new style of non-grammatical advertising writing was born.

Faster, snappier, punchier.

And it works because it’s the way people talk.

And it’s certainly a lot more inviting to read.

I once read an interview with Elmore Leonard.

He is probably the biggest-selling crime-writer ever.

He was asked in an interview, what made him such a successful writer.

Did he have any tips?

He said, “Lot’s of white space on the page.”

Every football manager finds out everything they can about the opposition before they play them.

That way they can make sure their team knows how to take advantage of the other team’s weaknesses.

That’s predatory thinking.

Don Revie was a football manager who went further than that.

He built up a dossier on every referee in the league.

Then he found out which one would be in charge of that weekend’s game.

Then he made each of his players study the referee’s file.

So they knew the names of his family, where he’d been on holiday, what his hobbies were.

Just little things they could drop into the conversation in the tunnel, while waiting to go onto the pitch.

The referee would think they were nicer guys than the other team, who didn’t know anything about him.

The usual statistics for refereeing decisions is roughly 50/50.

Half in your favour, half against.

But over the season Leeds got over 70% of decisions in their favour, and under 30% against.

Under Don Revie, Leeds won 3 championships, 3 cups, and 2 EUFA Cups.

That’s real predatory thinking.

If you want something, you have to take it off someone else.

You have to out think them

There’s the story of two explorers walking through the jungle.

Suddenly they hear a tiger roar.

One explorer sits down and takes a pair of running shoes out of his back pack.

“You’re crazy, you’ll never out run a tiger” says the other explorer.

“I don’t have to out run the tiger” he replies.

“I just have to out run you.”

Conventional thinking is that the best man wins.

That’s also lazy thinking.

How do you beat someone who’s better than you?

That’s creative thinking.

As Maurice Saatchi used to say, “I don’t have to win. I just have to make you lose.”