Dave Trott’s Blog

When my daughter was young all she wanted to do was watch TV.

She’d sit in front of it hypnotised.

This didn’t work for me.

I wanted her to use her imagination, develop her mind.

In short, I wanted her to be learning.

But I didn’t want to force her to learn.

I wanted her to have what she wanted.

But I also wanted what I wanted.

This seemed to me just like an advertising problem.

How can we set it up so that everyone gets what they want?

What’s a creative way to approach that?

Mainly she loved cartoons.

So I looked everywhere for interesting cartoons that I thought she’d like.

Eventually I found a series of all Shakespeare’s plays.

They’d been made by different east European animation companies.

Some were drawn animation, some were 3D stop-frame.

In each case the play had been reduced from several hours down to half hour.

They kept the main plot lines, and the most important speeches.

Just what I wanted.

It wasn’t enough to bore her, just enough to stay interested.

She would watch anything that was animation on TV.

And without knowing it, she was getting a good grounding in the works of Shakespeare.

Stories of love, and honour, confusion and betrayal.

All told in fancy costumes and elegant language.

Just the sort of thing to interest a little girl.

I knew it was working when I found her and her little brother in the kitchen one day.

There was a large puddle of milk on the floor and they looked guilty.

I said, “Who’s spilt this all over the floor?”

She stood up straight, looked me in the eye, and said, “Thou canst not say I did it. Shake not thy gory locks at me.”

How can you get angry with a very little Lady Macbeth?

She was two years older than her little brother.

And little boys are different to little girls.

So several years later, he needed a different solution.

Because I was at work, he would come home from school and plonk himself in front of the TV.

So no homework would get done.

The most obvious solution was to take the TV sets away.

But what happens when the grownups want to watch it?

We needed a more creative approach to the problem.

How to get what we both wanted?

He wanted TV, I wanted him to do his homework.

So, start with researching the market, and come up with a brief.

Two things we know about boys: they love to play games, and they’re very competitive.

So how could I make that work for both of us?

Eventually, I thought let’s change all the TV plugs to French plugs.

They’ve only got 2 prongs and won’t fit into UK 3 prong sockets.

So that’s what I did.

I bought several French 2 prong plugs, and several 3 prong converter plugs.

You could only use the TV if you also used the UK converter plug.

So, every evening before I went to bed, I hid the converter plug in a different place.

I’d tell him he couldn’t have it until he’d done his homework.

Of course, at first, he’d spend an hour looking for it.

Then eventually, he realised he was just wasting TV time and he’d be better off doing his homework.

So he’d do it, then call me at the office, and I’d tell him where the plug was.

Then, before I went to bed the next night, I’d find a different place to hide the plug.

This worked well, and gradually the homework began getting done with as little disruption as possible.

Like all the best creative solutions, we each got what we wanted.

But there’s a sequel to this.

Recently on holiday we were talking about this and my son, now a grownup, told me that actually he knew where the hiding places were.

But he didn’t want me to know he knew.

So he’d come home, watch some TV, then do some homework and call me up to ask where the plug was.

Pretending he didn’t know.

I was really pleased with this.

Because instead of just getting his homework done, what had actually been happening was developing his mind.

He worked out how to give me what I wanted while still making sure he got what he wanted.

He was working out how to out-think me.

In short, he was learning how to be creative.

My favourite blog is AdContrarian.com.

It’s written, Monday to Friday, by Bob Hoffman who owns and runs an agency in San Francisco.

At least it used to be.

Bob just stopped writing.

He said he’s fed up writing about advertising every day.

Burned out, dried up.

That’s a real shame.

Reading the AdContrarian was my daily dose of getting back in touch with reality.

There’s more bullshit in our business than in most other businesses.

And it’s usually just someone not very good trying to jump on the bandwagon of whatever’s currently fashionable.

And what’s fashionable is news.

So it gets a lot of coverage.

And, as with all fashion, most people can’t sift the good from the bad.

Bob was very good at cutting through this.

Not just with rhetoric.

But facts and figures, names, dates, concrete results.

That’s why I’ve directed so many people to his site.

He is the little boy pointing out that the emporer isn’t actually wearing any clothes.

But there’s something more important than that I like.

I like his style of writing, whether it’s about advertising or not.

No nonsense, fast, punchy, and witty.

And that’s why I think it’s a shame he’s stopped.

For me there are two requirements from anything I read.

I have to learn something.

Or I have to be entertained.

If I’m not getting either of those two, why would I keep reading?

From the AdContrarian I usually got both.

But I never got less than one.

So here’s a thing.

Why does he have to stop writing, just because he’s fed up with writing about advertising?

The best advertising works because it’s creative.

You can find creativity everywhere.

And we can all learn from creativity wherever we find it.

I can learn lessons about creativity from Mohammed Ali, Mike Tyson, Max Baer, Vince Lombardi, Billy Beane, Brian Clough, Tony Adams, Jackie Stewart, Bill Shankley, Napoleon, Nelson, Heinz Guderian, Michael Wittmann, Willy Messerschmitt, Woody Allen, George Carlin, Rupert Murdoch, Richard Branson, Winston Churchill, Norman Tebbitt, Tony Benn, Pablo Picasso, Damien Hirst, Tintoretto, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, William of Ockham, Jean Paul Sartre, and Ernie Bilko.

All of these guys said or did something that made me go, “Wow, I wish I’d thought of that.”

Just look at the cover of the Sergeant Pepper album.

That’s The Beatles putting all their creative influences in one photograph.

And that was something I pored over at art school.

Why did John, Paul, and George like those people?

What was good about them?

I wanted to know what I could learn from them.

Whatever excites us will probably be something really clever.

And if we think it’s clever it’s probably because it’s creative.

And if it’s creative we can learn from it.

It’ll be good to read.

We don’t have to write about advertising.

Although advertising can be very creative, it isn’t the only form of creativity.

It’s applied creativity.

And there are lots of other forms of applied creativity.

So where else can we find it being applied?

What else took our breath away when we heard or saw it?

And what can we learn from it?

What can we take away and use?

Join up the dots.

On holiday in Umbria, we rented a place from a film director.

Umbria is different to Tuscany.

Tuscany is the renaissance part of Italy.

It’s Florence, and the Medicis, Michelangelo, Machiavelli.

Rows of beautifully neat cypress trees, well kept roads, the signs of people with money everywhere.

Umbria isn’t like that.

Umbria isn’t the renaissance, it’s medieval, it’s raw.

Little hilltop fortified towns and villages everywhere.

Tractors driving along the roads full of pot holes.

The locals bringing their plastic tables and chairs out onto the roadside.

To sit and drink wine, and chat and watch the sunset.

The place we stayed at was on top of a hill.

It was rebuilt from the ruins of an 11^th century castle.

The actual top of the hill still had some of the original walls, overgrown and returned to nature.

But the house we stayed in was rebuilt from the remains of the dilapidated buildings, whatever walls were left standing.

There was nothing else up there, and it was a very tall hill.

To get to the top you had to drive up about about a mile of the worst road surface imaginable.

It was what Umbrians call ‘white road’.

Which just means rutted and pitted dirt track full of lumps of gravel and rock.

The car sliding all over the place with a steep drop to one side.

When you finally get to the top there’s a stunning 360 degree view all round.

About a mile below you can see the valley, sometimes shrouded in cloud like a huge lake.

We were so high we were looking down on the birds flying in the valley below.

And in amongst the ruins on the hillside are props from the director’s movies.

Huge stone gargoyles, that could be from “Baron Munchhaussen’, or ‘Brazil’, or ‘The Twelve Monkeys’.

Massive great things that looked like they belonged on the side of Notre Dame Cathedral.

Eerily looming out of the wild vegetation that’s grown over them.

Of course, if you knock on them they’re actually fibreglass.

And somehow that adds to the eccentricity of the place.

The strange mix between the ancient, and someone’s imagination.

It adds vibrancy to the overriding feeling of living in history.

At night you can feel the ghosts of hundreds of years walking around you.

The medieval world didn’t go away.

It just got reshaped, and carried on.

You feel you’re walking over the same dried, parched stubble that sandaled feet have trodden on for centuries.

Hearing the village bells ringing out the time from the valley below, just the way they would have.

The sense of being in history is overwhelming, on a mountaintop literally overlooking it.

Just before we left, on the last day, we read the guest book.

This is left for people who’ve stayed to record their comments.

The previous people to stay were very disappointed.

They said, “Yes it’s an amazing house but it’s ruined by the drive up every day. Can’t something be done about the road?”

They went on to say, “The lack of shade around the pool spoiled the whole experience for the children. Why can’t there be large umbrellas, instead of having to sit under the trees?”

They continued, “The insects are awful, we have to sit indoors with the windows shut.”

Now here’s a thing.

We experienced all those things, but we experienced them from the other side.

To us it was part of the adventure.

Sure the road is a drag, but that’s how people have had to get to top of the mountain for centuries.

If you make a tarmac road it will certainly make it a bit more comfortable.

It will also kill a little bit of the romance.

It will become as easily accessible as everywhere else.

Sure you could have giant sun umbrellas instead of shading under the trees.

But it will also make it just a little bit more like any posh hotel.

Why not have a waiter bringing you drinks by the pool?

And I don’t know what you do about the flies.

They’ve probably been there even longer than the Umbrians.

If you get rid of all that aren’t you getting rid of part of the history of the place?

Sure you need some of life’s conveniences.

But every time you modernise something you lose something old.

I was talking to my wife about it.

She’s an art director, and she said we have similar creative problems with clients all the time.

It’s the same with any idea.

When does solving the practical problems kill the magic?

When does it stop being an improvement and actually just make it more like everything else?

When does it take away everything you loved about it in the first place?

You like it because it’s different.

And the first thing you want to do is change what makes it different.

Fix it up and improve it.

So that it becomes more like everything else.

And it stops being different.

For creative people it’s always a tough call.

Where do you draw the line?

Some changes are reasonable and will make your idea better.

And some changes just kill the magic.

How do you know when to stop?