There’s a great metaphor for life at the end of “The Wizard of Oz”.

Dorothy, her dog Toto, the Tin Man, the Straw Man, and the cowardly lion, spend the whole movie looking for The Wizard.

Oz is apparently so terrifying that everyone is scared stiff at the mere mention of his name.

Finally, Dorothy manages to get an audience with Oz himself.

She and her companions are ushered into his presence.

They stand trembling.

The massive figure, forty feet high, wreathed in smoke, addresses them in a booming voice.

‘WHO DARES TO SEEK AN AUDIENCE WITH THE GREAT OZ?’

They can barely speak from fear.

Everything they’ve heard is true.

They are awe struck.

But Dorothy’s little dog Toto doesn’t know any of this of course.

Because dogs can’t talk.

So he hasn’t been terrified by everything everyone’s told them.

He just scampers across the room and pulls some curtains apart.

Behind the curtains is a little old man.

He is working levers and talking into a microphone.

The forty foot high Oz is actually just a mechanical device.

This little man with is working it like a machine.

They ask him why he did it.

He says it’s because no one would take him seriously otherwise.

But people are impressed by size, so this way he gets attention.

Put simply, he lets people’s minds do the work for him.

He lets their own minds create the stereotype they need to be frightened of.

They then live their lives in fear of the stereotype they themselves created.

That’s what I was like before I went to New York.

I grew up in a reality with a set of rules I never questioned.

New York lifted me up out of that, and showed me my life from another angle.

New York was the little dog pulling the curtains apart.

Suddenly I could question all the things I’d thought were unquestionable.

What seemed to be facts were only true if I subscribed to it being that way.

I found that very empowering when I came back to London.

Powerful, important people weren’t as frightening as I previously thought they were.

The things I’d been frightened of didn’t exist in the real world.

Just in my head.

That was a more empowering lesson for me than anything I ever learned about advertising.

I see students and young people all the time trying to learn the rules, so they can follow them.

Trying to learn what they are, and aren’t, allowed to do.

And then, later on, grumbling about the rules.

They learn the restrictions.

And then they enforce the restrictions on themselves.

And then grumble about it.

Of course we have to learn the rules.

Just as we would learn the rules of any game we were playing: football, cricket, tennis.

But the rules are meant to be a spring board, not a straitjacket.

The floor, not the ceiling.

How can we ignore, or break, the rules and get away with it?

No one can teach you that.

Today is the last day of 2008.

Tomorrow is a whole new year.

It’s a good time to think about whether we want to spend it imposing restrictions on ourselves or not.

My art school was in Brooklyn.
They used to send us into Manhattan once a week, to learn from the pros on Madison Avenue.
One evening, while I was waiting for the class to start, I was sitting in a coffee bar on Times Square.
I noticed a black girl sitting at the counter.
She had a white Band-Aid on her leg.
I though, hang on, that’s supposed to be flesh-coloured Band-Aid.
But it’s not her flesh colour.
Why not?
Why shouldn’t flesh colour mean everybody’s flesh colour?
In fact, why not make Band-Aids in different flesh colours?
You could have Band Aids in Light, Medium, and Dark.
How cool would that be?
Then I thought, this could be an actual product.
In which case I could do an advertising campaign for it.
Which would be great because it would be a brief no one else would have in their book.
So I designed the packs, and wrote some ads.
One of them that went down really well, had the headline:
“NOW THERE’S A BAND-AID FOR QUEENS BOULEVARD, SOUTH TREMONT AVENUE, AND 125TH STREET.”
(That was a white area, a Puerto Rican area, and a black area.)
Then I thought, where would I run ads like that?
White people already have their flesh colour Band-Aids.
So I’m after Hispanics and Blacks.
Where do I find them?
Well, just like London, most of the people in cabs and cars are white.
Lots of the people on public transport aren’t.
So I’ll run them as posters on the NYC subway system.
And that was one of the campaigns I put in my portfolio.
In fact, that’s how I put my whole portfolio together.
Whatever it took to be different.
Everyone else was doing single ads, I’d do campaigns.
Everyone else was doing executions, I’d do strategies as well.
Everyone else was doing press ads, I’d do media plans as well.
If I’m doing what no one else is, I must look better at it.
Because I’m competing in a field of one.
Notice how different that was to the way youngsters do it today.
No one does an ad until they’re given a brief.
Well it’s not their job to write a brief.
So they call up various creative directors and ask if they have any briefs they can let them have.
Because they can’t be creative until someone gives them a brief.
They’re never going to be this free again in their lives.
They can be client, planner, account man, and media department.
For the only time in their lives, they can’t grumble about anyone else stopping them doing great ads.
And they don’t do it.
No one think about strategy, it’s not their job to do that.
No one thinks about media, it’s not their job either.
So everyone competes in the tiny little area of pictures and headlines.
And that little area is growing smaller and smaller.
And you know what?
It’s getting harder and harder to be different.
You now why?

Because it’s not a very creative way to think.

The business problem is usually upstream of advertising.
The business problem is the job the advertising is being asked to do.
It’s the question “Why are we advertising?”
The kneejerk answer is, “To get more customers.”
But is that always the right answer?
Instead the answer might be, “To get current customers to buy more.”
Or it might be, “To be able to charge more for what we sell.”
It might be, “To get younger customers, most of ours are old and dying off.”
It might be, “ To buy this instead of our competitor.”
Or it might be, “To buy this as well as our competitor.”
There are many, many possibilities.
The next question is usually,  “How will advertising do this?”
The kneejerk answer is, “By making people feel good about our brand.”
But that’s just one possible answer.
It might be, “By telling them we cost less.”
It might be, “Telling them why we’re worth more.”
It might be, “Get the to remember our name.”
It might be, “Play on their fears.”
It might be, “To attract a higher demographic amongst readers so we can charge more for advertising space.”
But I tell you what it isn’t, ever.
It isn’t ever, “To win awards.”
That might be the creative director’s real brief from agency management.
But I bet you that isn’t ever written on the brief.
Especially not the brief that the client sees.
Because winning awards is what’s in it for the agency.
So that’s unsaid.
That’s how the agency wins new business.
That’s how the creative director keeps his job.
That’s how the creative team get a new job.
You see, there are two agendas going on.
The agency agenda.
And the client agenda.
Agencies want awards.
Clients want increase in revenue.
They use the term ROI: return on investment.
Put simply, does this advertising bring in more money than it costs?
And the answer better be yes.
That’s how the client keeps his job.
Sometimes the two agendas are the same.
Sometimes the ads that win awards are the ads that work.
Sometimes not.
I don’t think creative awards should be linked to sales.
I had this argument a long time ago with David Abbott.
He felt that sales effectiveness was more to do with the IPA than D&AD.
I think he’s right.
I just think we should be honest that they’re not.
I think we should stop pretending the ads we like are automatically the ads that sell the most.
The difference is the target audience.
If the brief is to increase sales, your target audience is wherever that growth is going to come from.
It might be housewives, or children, or old people.
But it’s also everyone in the UK.
If you can get them repeating, whistling, talking about your ad, you’ve generated free media.
So more exposure for the advertising message.
So more chance of the ad working.
Now an ad like that may get an award, and it may not.
But, if you just want to go directly for winning awards, your target market is different.
It’s twelve industry creative’s on the award jury.
You have to do something that either makes them laugh, or they think is beautiful, or they think is shocking.
Good criteria, but a different audience.
That is unless your target market is college educated, B-C1, male, 25 -35, London media professionals.
The good news is, it is possible to please both audiences.
To do ads that we all love, and ads that work.
The bad news is, it takes more effort than just a kneejerk response.

Do you notice, people are always saying that advertising isn’t as good as it used to be, and asking what happened?

Well, I was always taught, “You’ll never make a bad idea better by good execution. And you’ll never spoil a great idea by bad execution.”

In other words, the idea is more important than the execution.

Put simply, a good idea badly executed is better than a bad idea well executed.

Or, as they used to say, “You can’t polish a turd.”

Doesn’t that attitude sound old fashioned now?

When everything is about execution.

And when execution is way more important than idea.

Years back Mike Greenlees (then CEO at GGT) told me it was heading this way.

He said that, in the future, clients would be much more willing to spend massive amounts of money executing a mediocre script.

Rather than shoot a high profile, controversial script.

A high profile script is potentially risky.

A low profile script isn’t.

So, if you wanted to do advertising that your peers admired, it was much safer, from a client’s position, to spend a fortune on a huge production to hide the fact that you had a mundane script.

And that’s what happened.

Don’t say anything.

But say it in a very expensive way.

Money became plentiful.

There was no need to for advertisers fight for it.

Consumers had plenty to spend on everything.

Everybody behaved like WAGS.

Never mind how good it is.

Is it expensive?

And, just like the economy, advertising carried on getting more and more bloated.

Let’s spend a fortune on this ad.

It doesn’t have to work hard.

We’ve got tons of money coming in.

And no one had to attack the competition.

Because consumers had lots and lots of money to spend on everything.

So no one took any risks.

Forget being confrontational and controversial.

Let’s just talk about our brand.

Let’s show how classy our brand is by much money we can spend on an ad saying nothing.

Well, that may all be about to change.

Suddenly consumers don’t have lots of money.

So neither will clients.

Suddenly everyone’s fighting for the same money.

And you’ll see how that changes things.

Advertising will have to get aggressive.

Clients won’t be able to afford fat, lazy advertising anymore.

They won’t be able to afford to make it.

And they won’t be able to afford the fact that it doesn’t work.

Now every pound will have to work like five pounds.

And, hopefully, that means a return to aggressive advertising.

Advertising that tells your consumers directly, simply, memorably why they should spend their money on your product, and not your competitors.

It’ll need to be impactful, memorable, and persuasive.

The times of being nice, and not upsetting anyone, not making waves may be over.

We may just be about to see a return to good advertising.

Often, account men think they’d like to be a copywriter.

The creative department looks more fun.

No one does much work.

They sit around and play music or look at photography books, or YouTube all day.

And the account guy knows he can write puns.

In fact his messages, on staff leaving cards and birthday cards, are funnier than what the copywriters write.

So he writes a script for a commercial.

And the creative director doesn’t buy it.

So he never writes anything again.

He can’t handle rejection.

He wrote one thing and he expected it to get bought.

When it didn’t get bought he was destroyed.

The creative department is no place for anyone who can’t handle rejection.

Our lives are about rejection.

When you start, you have to do roughly two dozen roughs to get six that you think are good enough to show the crerative director.

If you’re lucky, he’ll pick three to show the client.

If you’re lucky, the client will only turn down two.

And you’ll have an ad running.

Of course, you’ll have twenty three ads rejected as not good enough.

The difference is, you’ll forget all about them because you’ve got an ad running.

They were just stepping stones on the way.

Michelangelo once carved a massive horse out of a block of marble.

He was asked how he could create such a beautiful object from such a massive shapeless lump.

He said, “Easy. I just cut away everything that isn’t the horse.”

Rejected ads are like that to us.

The chips of stone that we have to get out of the way so that we can get to the thing we want.

When I started at BMP, my ratio was about one good ad out of every eight roughs.

In the next offices, the senior teams were doing one good ad for every four roughs.

So I knew it was just a matter of numbers.

If they did four roughs, I’d do sixteen.

Then they’d have one good ad, but I’d have two good ads.

I would look twice as good as them even though I was actually only half as good.

Because no one would see me throwing away four times as many roughs.

Rejection is just part of our job.

The way running is to a footballer.

You run and run, and sweat and puff, for an hour and a half for nothing.

And suddenly you connect, and the ball goes in the net.

Then everything else disappears, and that moment expands to fill your whole world.