Dave Trott’s Blog

When I was about 14, I overheard a conversation by the bike sheds at school.

One of the boys was telling the other that he’d heard wanking was harmful.

He’d heard it was responsible for everything from blindness to mental instability.

He asked the other boy what he thought.

The other boy shrugged and said, “Use it or lose it.”

I’ve often thought that’s a good metaphor for life.

Why are we trying to hang onto it?

We can’t save it.

It won’t keep.

This applies particularly to us, in the business of ideas and creativity.

We have an idea for an ad campaign.

We think we’d better save it until the right opportunity crops up.

Except it won’t.

We have an idea for a website, a new product, a book, a film technique.

Ditto.

If we wait for the right opportunity it won’t happen.

It’ll stay in our drawer until the world has passed it by.

Times will change and newer, more exciting things will be happening.

Now it looks old and tired.

Now it’s too late.

If we don’t find a way to make it happen, if we don’t take a chance and overcome lethargy and embarrassment to do it, it will disappear.

Students always ask me what I think they should do.

I tell them, “The answer is always the same two words: ‘everything’ and ‘now’.”

When WCRS was a young agency they pitched for the Milk Marketing Board account.

Milk was a healthy drink that built strong bodies.

So that was what Ron Collins based his idea on.

Different people, in different situations, performing amazing feats.

And the strapline, “I bet he drinks milk.”

Well. for one reason or another they didn’t win the Milk pitch.

And yet.

I bet you get the sneaky feeling that you’ve seen that line somewhere else.

And you’d be right.

Their next pitch was for Carling Black Label.

They changed the line into, “I bet he drinks Carling Black Label.”

They won the pitch, and did some great beer advertising with a line that got into the language.

Despite the fact that you’d think beer advertising would be a million miles away from milk advertising.

They had a great idea and they found a way to make it happen.

I was thinking about this yesterday when I was driving to Sussex.

Paul Arden’s widow Toni, and his children Christian and Harriett, were having a memorial for Paul.

But of course, it couldn’t be an ordinary one.

Not for Paul.

We had champagne and fish and chips in the grounds of the cottage he renovated, overlooking the valley and rolling hills.

It was a perfect evening, not a breath of wind and visibility for miles and miles.

In the last of the twilight Paul’s grandchildren, Charlie, Tom and Attila, began letting off little hot air balloons.

White envelopes that drifted way up into the sky with a flickering light beneath them.

Like spirits, going higher and higher until they eventually disappeared from sight.

Then, when darkness fell, a spectacularly beautiful fireworks show.

A perfect evening just the way Paul would have wanted it.

Culminating in a rocket bearing his ashes.

It arched into the sky higher than anything else and exploded into a massive perfect golden shower.

Scattering Paul’s ashes all over the Sussex Downs he loved.

And I thought, there it is.

A memorial for Paul that is exactly the way he lived his life.

Right down to his ashes.

Don’t hang onto them in a vase and keep them on the mantelpiece.

Get a great a great idea, and find a way to do it.

And do it now.

Use it or lose it.

Advertising started with the snake-oil salesmen in the Wild West.

They didn’t really have anything to sell except bottles of coloured water, which didn’t actually do anything.

So all that was important was how these salesmen could charm the gullible public.

They admired and trusted the salesman, so they’d buy whatever he was selling.

As people gradually became more educated, this resulted in advertising getting a bad reputation.

Just like used-car salesmen.

Who would avoid talking about the product, but would seduce you with their patter.

In 1950s America there was a reaction against this.

Manufacturers didn’t want patronising advertising that was greeted with suspicion by their customers, and made the company look bad.

So the USP was born.

The Unique Selling Proposition.

Avoid smarmy salesmanship.

Stick to the facts.

Find something different about your product and say it.

So everyone copied that for a while.

And advertising became really boring.

“Our washing powder gets your clothes X% cleaner.”

“Our car gives you X% more miles per gallon.”

“Our washing machine spins X% faster.”

“Our dishwasher is X% quieter.”

“Our TV set gives you X% more colour.”

This was a corruption of a good idea.

Finding something unique about your product is a great start point.

Finding a reason why someone should actually part with cash for what you make rather than what your competitor makes.

This is common sense if you’re in the business of selling anything to anyone.

The problem is lazy thinking.

Finding any difference, no matter how small or irrelevant, and stopping there.

USP stands for Unique Selling Proposition.

The two magic two here are ‘unique’ and ‘selling’.

What you talk about has to be unique, not just a marginal improvement on what everyone else offers.

Plus, for it to be ‘selling’, which means it has to be something that people truly want.

Not just any old point of difference.

Unique on it’s own isn’t enough.

But lazy thinking meant that, as soon as anyone found any benefit, no matter how tiny, they called it a USP and did an ad.

Then the ads became all about delivering this information.

So the ads were dull, factual, purely informative.

And the USP got a bad name because of it.

It was replaced by the ESP.

The Emotional Selling Proposition.

This is the belief that, since information was boring, you don’t have to say anything at all.

All that’s important is how you say it.

So you have the latest fashion.

The rise of pure brand advertising.

All that matters is the brand, the product is unimportant.

Everyone is trying to say nothing in a very charming and seductive way.

A sort of postmodern Arthur Daley.

I’ve just finished reading a speech by Bill Bernbach.

He talks about the need for both emotion and reason.

Start with a fact, but don’t stop there.

How you say something may well be more important than what you say.

But you have to have something to say in the first place.

If you have nothing to say that will soon be apparent.

No one will be fooled.

Think of it as an oyster.

You start with a piece of grit, and build a pearl around it.

People buy the pearl, they don’t buy the grit.

But no grit, no pearl.

When you talk to someone about something you passionately believe in, they won’t just buy the logic of your argument.

They’ll also buy the passion with which you deliver it.

But if it’s passion about nothing, they won’t buy that either.

Because that’s just back to snake-oil salesmen.

When my Mum was in her eighties, her mind was still good, but she couldn’t look after herself anymore.

I didn’t want to send her to a care home.

So I used to pay for carers to come and live with her and look after her at home.

Generally these were older ladies, they’d chat with Mum and help her out.

One of these was a very nice German lady.

I got talking to her and it turned out, when she was a teenager, she’d been in The Hitler Youth.

I was quite surprised and I asked her how she could support the Nazi party.

She said she didn’t, but at the time it didn’t seem much different to joining the Boy Scouts or Girl Guides.

I could understand this.

If there’d been a Churchill Youth, most of the children in England would have joined.

Then, if Germany had won the war, Churchill would have been painted as a war criminal, and support for him unthinkable.

The winners always write the rules.

So it isn’t so much a matter of being right or wrong, as it is winning or losing.

I feel the same way about the controversy over ‘scam’ advertising.

Over the years we’ve done several dozen anti Third World Debt films.

Plus posters and press ads.

Anywhere we could find the media.

Everyone from directors to photographers, editors to tea-ladies, working for free.

Studios, camera equipment, stock footage, even space in the media, all supplied for free.

Sometimes, where it wasn’t supplied for free, I paid.

Because there wasn’t a client.

The titles at the end of each ad just said: “Write to your MP”.

Now by all definitions, that was ‘scam’ advertising.

We entered those ads for awards schemes, and won silvers and golds.

This meant opinion-formers worldwide got to hear about the Third World Debt crisis.

Between us, we helped get it on the radar.

Advertising used as a force for good: giving instead of just taking.

But it still qualifies as ‘scam’ advertising.

None of the charities would put their name to it, so we didn’t have a client.

If ‘scam’ advertising is inherently bad, was it bad that we did that?

Would it have been better to obey the rules about ‘scam’ advertising and ignore the Third World Debt crisis?

I don’t think so.

Even if we only saved a few lives, I think the end justifies the means.

Sure ‘scam’ advertising done for purely small, selfish, greedy motives is bad.

But then anything done for purely small, selfish, greedy motives is bad.

The rules are there as a guideline.

They’re not there to help us evade personal responsibility.

That was the defence used at the Nuremburg War Trials.

When the death camp guards said they couldn’t be blamed, because they were “just following orders”.

Consequently they said it wasn’t their fault.

They were just being good soldiers.

I don’t buy that argument.

I was always brought up to obey, “The spirit of the law. Not the letter of the law.”

In other words, do what you know is right.

Don’t just unthinkingly hide behind the rules.

So don’t blame scam advertising.

Blame the person.

And blame them for being stupid.

Because the rule still applies, that you can’t be in the wrong unless you get found out.

And if you get found out you’re stupid.

George Lois said, “Don’t show me your drawerful of great roughs.

If it don’t run it ain’t advertising.”

I agree.

Anyone can write a great ad that never runs.

What really cuts through is when you see an ad running and you can’t believe they got away with it.

I used to feel that when I saw Saatchi’s ads.

I was jealous.

They were running ads that we couldn’t get away with.

So I tried to work out what we were doing wrong at BMP.

The problem was we lost a lot of good ads because the ITCA kept turning the scripts down.

The ITCA (now the BACC) were the TV censorship authority.

So what could we do about it?

Well, at that time, the TV department was in charge of getting scripts cleared through the ITCA.

So the TV producer would send the script over to the ITCA and relay their decision back to the creative department.

That was it, no discussion.

We lost a lot of good work this way.

The problem wasn’t writing good ads, the problem was getting them to run.

So when we opened GGT, I thought we’d do it differently.

TV producers couldn’t argue about the ITCA’s decisions, that wasn’t their job.

So we’d use people whose job it was to argue.

We’d use account men.

Immediately our rate of good ads on air went up.

Account men sold scripts for a living, to clients.

The only difference was now they were also selling them to the ITCA.

If there was a problem, they’d argue it, they’d try to find a way around it, They’d even advise us on a rewrite.

We began to get ads on air that other agencies couldn’t.

Of course, sometimes even the account men couldn’t do it.

That’s when you have to decide how badly you want to ad to run.

Do you want it badly enough to get off your arse?

If you do, you may have to use some creativity to get it to run.

We had to do it several times.

Once with a commercial we wrote for Knirps (pronounced K-nirps) umbrellas.

The problem was branding.

We had to convince people to care what brand of umbrella they bought.

Most umbrellas break when they turn inside-out.

Check out the waste-baskets up and down Oxford Street after a rain storm.

But Knirps were stronger, so you just popped it back again.

We thought a good way to demonstrate this was to have a guy standing in a carwash using the umbrella.

Then at the end say, “YOU CAN BREAK A BROLLEY BUT YOU CAN’T K-NACKER A K-NIRPS.”

But when we sent it to the ITCA and of course they turned the script down.

They had two grounds for objection.

One: they said they didn’t believe an umbrella would survive in a carwash.

Two: ‘knacker’ was a swear word.

So, first off we agreed to demonstrate the umbrella’s strength in a car wash.

We made an appointment for them to see it for real.

We got there early so the actor could practice holding the umbrella in such a way that it wouldn’t break.

Eventually we got it right.

So when the ITCA turned up, we were able to ’prove’ to them it worked.

Then I went to a bookshop and looked at dictionaries.

I found two dictionaries that said “knackers’ was a swear word meaning testicles.

And I found two dictionaries that said “knacker’s yard” was a place where old horses were taken to be killed, so ‘knackered’ meant broken or useless.

Obviously, I only took the second two dictionaries and went along to the ITCA.

I showed them the two dictionaries that had the definition in I wanted.

And so I was able to ‘prove’ to them that ‘knacker’ wasn’t a swear word.

And we got a terrific ad made.

Instead of just a script that never ran.

A couple of years back, Radio 4 ran a programme on the history of swearing and how it started.

Apparently it was the Victorians who invented the concept.

It didn’t exist before them.

The words existed of course.

But not the concept that some words were unfit for use.

What caused the invention of swearing was the advent of road signs.

With the Victorians came the need to formalise every address.

So they could supply sewage to every house, gas or electric, mail delivery, everything we now take for granted.

The problem was London had grown organically over two thousand years.

Streets just happened to be pathways between groups of houses.

They acquired nicknames that were just a way to describe them.

So you might tell someone to go to, “the street with all the blacksmiths”.

This would pretty soon be shortened to “Blacksmith Street”.

Which is how we got “Butcher Street” or “Baker Street” or “Leather Lane”.

So far so good.

But the problem was slang.

For instance, a street of stables might be known as “Horseshit Row”.

Because that was its most noticeable feature.

The BBC said one alley, that prostitutes used, was known as “Grope Cunt Lane.”

Before the advent of road signs this wasn’t a problem.

Polite Victorian society wouldn’t have any reason to talk about these streets, much less walk down them.

But suddenly every street was going to have its named printed in large black and white letters.

Up where everyone could see it.

“GROPE CUNT LANE” just wasn’t going to happen.

So a lot of streets had to be renamed.

And a list of unfit words was compiled.

And the concept of swearing was born.

Grope Cunt Lane, for instance, had to be renamed as ‘Grape Lane’.

The main point being, when you see something written down it has a much more ‘in your face’ quality than something merely spoken.

When John Major was Prime Minister he knew his own party were against him, and called them “a bunch of shits”.

The next day, Sue Douglas, editor of The Sunday Express, ran that as the front-page headline: “BUNCH OF SHITS”.

She was fired.

Somehow it was much more powerful to see it, than just to hear it.

The same is true in advertising.

Nick Wray once wrote a very nice commercial for Mazda.

The commercial took place in a massive warehouse.

Huge wooden boxes were lifted, one-at-a-time, to reveal smaller boxes underneath, like Russian dolls.

It went roughly like this:

(Vision: A huge wooden box is lifted by chains, revealing a slightly smaller second box.)

Anncr: The outside of a Rolls Royce is bigger than the outside of a Mazda.

(Vision: The second wooden box is lifted, revealing a third wooden box.)

Anncr: But the inside of a Mazda…..

(Vision: The third wooden box is lifted, revealing an even smaller fourth wooden box.)

Anncr: …..is bigger than the inside of a Rolls Royce.

Voice: That’s amazing.

(Vision: Dissolve through to Mazda logo.)

Anncr: No, that’s a Mazda.

The problem was we couldn’t print the words “Rolls Royce” on the box.

If we showed the name it was considered copyright infringement.

Whereas if we merely said it, it wasn’t.

Which was a shame.

Because, although the ad was a strong demonstration of a good fact, it would have been simpler, more powerful, and more memorable to have the words Rolls Royce and Mazda on the boxes.

A picture may not always be worth a thousand words, but to see something is often more emphatic than just hearing it.