Dave Trott’s Blog

I was having lunch with Jeremy Sinclair, and we were talking about football.

Jeremy isn’t interested in football himself.

But one of his partners, David Kershaw, is an avid Arsenal fan.

He gets elated when they win, and depressed when they lose.

This fascinated Jeremy, because it made no sense.

Why would anyone care about a bunch of highly paid strangers kicking a ball around?

If they win, you’re actually no better off yourself.

And if they lose, you personally haven’t lost anything.

So why would you care?

It was difficult for me to explain because I don’t actually go to football matches.

I love football, but I’d much rather watch it at home.

The camera is always exactly where the ball is.

There are replays of goals, in slow motion, from different angles.

It’s a short walk to the fridge for another beer.

I much prefer to watch football on TV.

Either at the pub, or with mates, or even at home alone.

Unless it’s a live England or West Ham match.

Then I don’t like to watch because I care too much who wins.

I get upset and stressed, and I can’t enjoy the game.

Afterwards Jeremy said that was the most interesting thing he heard during  lunch.

“You can’t enjoy the game if you care too much about the result.”

Jeremy has studied philosophy a lot.

He’d just put his finger on a basic truth about life, advertising, everything.

You can’t enjoy it if you care too much about the result.

That’s the Buddhist doctrine of non-attachment.

If you are attached to things turning out a certain way, you can’t enjoy the ride.

All that matters to you is the result, not the journey.

And yet in life, the journey is all there is.

We already know the result.

We die.

And we don’t want it to happen too soon.

So, now we know the result we can give up worrying and enjoy the ride.

“Be here now,” as Buddha would say.

But we don’t do that.

We worry and fret over every little thing.

Did we lose the pitch?

Did Campaign say something bad about us?

Did someone else get credit for our work?

Did someone else get a raise?

Did we get left out of a meeting?

Jerry Della Femina wrote a great book about advertising in New York in the 1960s.

He was a brilliant copywriter who was loving every minute of his life working in advertising.

He was from Brooklyn and most of his friends worked in factories, or shops, or drove cabs for a living.

So to Jerry, advertising was a giant, glamorous toyshop.

40 years ago he described it as, “The most fun you can have with your clothes on.”

One day he met an account man who always seemed to be worried.

This guy was always sweating and nervous.

He was losing his hair, he drank, he smoked, he chewed his nails.

Jerry asked him how come he was always so uptight.

The account man said he’d heard one of his clients just had lunch with another agency.

He also heard another of his clients say they liked the work a different agency was doing.

And another of his clients was seen talking to an account man from another agency.

Jerry said to him, “How can you be so worried, you were a fighter pilot in WW2? You shot down German planes that were trying to kill you. If you weren’t frightened of the Nazis what are you worried about now?”

The guy shouted, “Nazis don’t steal accounts.”

Huh?

I think that guy lost his sense of perspective.

Whatever happens in advertising can’t be as scary as people trying to kill you 4 miles above Germany.

I’m sure he thought “If I live through this, I’ll treasure every second of my life.”

But then, over time, he forgot it.

And his job in advertising became life-and-death again.

Here’s what I think.

Everyone who went to university wants to work in advertising.

Everyone in advertising wants to work in the creative department.

We’re already in a great place.

Sometimes we forget to enjoy it.

Alan Parker, the film director, was being interviewed by Arte, the cultural TV channel that plays across all Europe.

He’d started off as a copywriter at CDP.

He was now Sir Alan Parker, the head of The British Film Institute.

He’d won lots of awards when he was Creative Director at CDP.

He’d won many, many more awards as a commercial’s director.

Then he’d made feature films, which were massive critical and box-office successes on both sides of the Atlantic.

He was one of the main influences in transforming British advertising and British cinema.

He was being interviewed by a typically earnest cultural guru.

The interviewer wanted to start by finding out about Alan’s early influences.

He asked him, “What did your father do?”

Alan said, “My dad was a painter.”

Aha, this was clearly the clue to Alan’s creativity.

The interviewer asked “What sort of painter, how did he use the medium of paint?”

Alan said, “He only ever used one colour really.”

The interviewer was impressed.

He said, “Ah, so he was an avante garde artist?”

Alan said, “No, he painted the railings for British Rail.”

That interviewer didn’t know what to say.

He was expecting a long pretentious answer, citing impressive cultural credentials.

He looked puzzled.

There were clearly no cultural influences there.

No reasons why Alan should be better at mass media than anyone else.

So he moved on to another line of questioning.

Delving and looking for reasons why Alan was great.

But I think the interviewer was wrong.

I think he had the answer to what made Alan great right there.

His dad painted the railings for British Rail.

I think that was Alan’s advantage.

He didn’t grow up treating mass-media seriously.

As the be-all and end-all.

For him it was a bit of fun that went on around real life.

But it wasn’t real life.

Painting the railings for British Rail was real life.

Leaving home every morning at 6.00am to start work outdoors, in the cold and the dark.

That was real life.

Advertising, films, music, photography, books, paintings, stage shows.

That was just what you noticed after you’d handled the real stuff.

Nice but not essential.

If it was good you paid attention to it.

But most of it was crap so you didn’t.

That was the advantage Alan had over people who’d been brought up to take mass media too seriously.

They assumed everyone paid attention to everything that was done in those mediums.

They thought the public was watching what was happening in our world like kids with their noses pressed against a toy-shop window.

Alan knew that wasn’t true.

Over 90% of it wasn’t even noticed.

It was wallpaper.

If it wasn’t different, unusual, if it didn’t have impact, it didn’t even get on the radar.

So that became Alan’s brief.

Not ‘how to do it the right way’.

But ‘how to do it so it gets noticed’.

Big difference.

Big advantage.

He hadn’t learned the rules that everyone gets taught by reading all the case studies.

The case studies that are written after the event and turned into principles for students to learn.

And what have we learned from studying the case studies?

All we’ve learned is how not to have fun.

To take it all too seriously.

Alan didn’t read the case studies because he was too busy actually doing the work.

He was too busy having fun.

Making ads that he knew would make people in the real world watch and laugh.

And if they laughed, they’d notice it.

And if they laughed and noticed it and remembered it, it had a better chance of working than if they didn’t.

You don’t need years of study and a degree to work that out.

That’s what you learn that in the real world.

A few years back, there was a massive flood in our street in Hampstead.

Everything was under several feet of water.

There’s a really nice gay couple next door, and they were telling me their whole library was ruined.

They said they had it themed on ‘The Titanic’.

They did it because of the bit where Leonardo di Caprio holds Kate Winslett over the bow of the ship.

Where Celine Dion sings, “I Will Always Love You”.

That was their song.

So they’d bought lots of Titanic artefacts.

Things that had been recovered from the actual wreck.

They had them on display in their library, but the flood had ruined them.

So they were going to claim on their insurance.

It made perfect sense to them.

But I think, if I was insurance company’s loss-adjustor I might have seen it differently.

“Let’s see if I’ve got this right:

These items have been laying 7 miles down under the Atlantic Ocean for ninety years, and you reckon an unusually heavy rainfall in Hampstead ruined them?”

But, although that may not make sense to everyone, it made perfect sense to them.

Things sometimes make sense in one person’s world that don’t make sense in someone else’s.

Take censors.

The TV censorship authority is called Clearcast, it used to be the BACC.

We wanted to run a TV campaign for Holsten Export.

We had the comedian Neil Innes in different locations.

In one particular commercial he was playing the piano on the moon.

Around him were lots of cans of his favourite beer, Holsten Export.

The BACC said they had a problem with that.

We asked what the problem was.

They said, “You’re showing too many cans of Holsten Export. That could imply excessive drinking.”

So we asked how many cans of Holsten Export we could show.

They said, “That depends, does he have a fridge?”

Well, we said, he could have a fridge on the moon if it would help.

They said, “Well if he had a fridge he could conceivably be getting his week’s supply of Holsten Export ready to chill in the fridge.”

We asked how many cans that would be.

They said, “Well it’s okay to suggest drinking two cans a day, so two times seven is fourteen.”

We said okay, we’d have fourteen cans on display and several huge crates.

They said, “Ah.”

We said, are the massive crates a problem?

They said, “Massive crates of beer could suggest excessive drinking.”

We said he’d come all the way from the earth to the moon.

He’d have to bring a large supply of his favourite beer with him.

They said, “If you had ‘One Year’s Supply of Holsten Export’ clearly stencilled on the side of each crate. That would show it’s got to last a long time.”

So that’s what we did, and that’s how I ran.

I don’t think anyone but the BACC ever noticed it was there.

You’d need to freeze-frame the picture to see it.

But it made perfect sense to them.

Another time Dave Waters and Paul Grubb did a campaign for The Daily Mirror.

It featured news footage of famous people falling over, or pulling funny faces.

Dave and Paul wanted to superimpose a copy of the Mirror hitting them immediately beforehand.

So it looked like they were reacting to getting whacked.

We had lots of funny footage of famous people.

One particular clip was Frank Bruno, the boxer, getting his OBE at Buckingham Palace.

As he held up his award for the cameras, his top hat fell off.

We thought we could add a copy of The Mirror to make it look like it was knocking his hat off.

But the BACC had a problem.

They thought that Frank Bruno wearing a top hat looked too much like Baron Samedi.

One of the main deities of the Haitian voodoo cult.

And knocking off his top hat could cause offence on religious grounds.

Now in that situation, your immediate response is to say, “You’re joking, right?”

But if you say that, your commercial won’t be allowed to run on TV.

So you say, “Hmmmm, I see your point.”

And you take the scene out.

Because, whatever we think, it makes perfect sense to them.

When Winston Churchill retired from politics he took up painting.

He’d already chosen the view.

He’d been thinking about painting for years.

He set up his easel in his garden.

He got just the right size canvas.

He organised all his paints and brushes.

He’d chosen a perfectly comfortable stool.

He made sure everything was absolutely right.

Then he tried to decide where to start on the painting.

He stared at the pristine, white canvas.

Should he start in one area and work his way across?

Or should he sketch in the rough outline first?

Should he try to include the whole landscape?

Or should he pick one particular part to concentrate on?

How to begin exactly?

Two hours later his wife came out with a cup of tea.

He hadn’t painted a thing.

He was still sitting there thinking.

The canvas was still perfectly white.

His wife asked him why he hadn’t painted anything.

He said he couldn’t decide where to start.

So she picked up one of his brushes and painted a huge squiggle in the middle of the canvas.

Churchill went ballistic.

“What are you doing, you’ve ruined a perfectly good canvas.”

She said, “Well now you’ll just have to fix it won’t you.”

And he started to fix the mess.

Scraping off the paint, and painting over it.

And pretty soon he’d painted his first landscape.

See what was stopping Churchill was knowing how to start.

What his wife did was take the start-point away.

She gave him a problem to fix instead.

The man who could lead Britain in a world war didn’t know what to do with a blank canvas.

Give him a problem to fix, a massive mess that no one else could sort out.

Fine.

But how do you start when there is no problem?

Creative people are good at fixing problems.

Good at responding.

Not so good at creating from nothing.

With no brief, no direction, no ideas, nothing to get hold of.

There’s one thing I remember from physics lessons at school.

If you have a piece of metal, and you want to magnetise it, just keep bashing it with a hammer.

Eventually all the molecules will line up with little North and South poles.

So the whole piece of metal will have a single North and South Pole, like a magnet.

Just by banging away at it, everything will arrange itself in the right direction.

Just by shaking things up.

That’s a lot of what creativity is.

Shaking things up.

Creating things, situations, opinions for people to respond to.

Alan Parker, the film director, once gave me a piece of advice.

He said, “When you’re directing a film and you can’t decide which way to go, the worst thing you can do is stop and think about it.

Because, while you’re thinking, nothing’s happening.

And all the crew, and the actors, the studio, the lights, the camera, everything you’ve hired, is just sitting there doing nothing.

While you stop and think.

So the best thing you can do is just pick a direction and go for it.

You’ll find out very fast if it’s the right way to go.

If it is, carry on.

If it isn’t, at least you’ll know what you should be doing.

And you’ll get the answer a lot quicker than thinking about it.”

Isn’t that great advice, whenever we’re stuck on something?

Don’t sit and stare into space thinking about it.

Do something.

Anything.

Get it moving, get unstuck.

As Edward de Bono says, “The purpose of thinking isn’t conclusions, it’s movement.”

Which is why he coined the term ‘lateral thinking’.

To challenge conventional thinking.

To find a way to jolt us out of our rut, to get us unstuck.

And that’s why creative people are often provocative.

To provoke a reaction.

As Tony Benn says, “Democracy isn’t about crushing the opposition. It’s about the vitality of the debate.”

Shaking things up.

Recently, Ben Kay had a debate on his blog about what sort of creative director you should work for.

Ben finally decided it should be one you respect.

The issue then becomes, how do you define respect?

I guess everyone has to come up with their own version of how you pick who you work for.

For me it was always, can I learn from this guy, and is their opinion better than mine.

I worked for John Webster for 10 years.

I kept trying to leave, I had lots of interviews.

But every other creative director wasn’t as good as John Webster.

Every interview I had just made me realise I was working for the best.

What John did for me was make me better.

He made me braver, he made me take chances, he made me do better work.

Isn’t that what you want from a creative director.

So for 10 years I couldn’t leave.

Then John made someone else creative director.

And I didn’t want to report to him, I didn’t think he was as good as me.

So I left and started my own agency.

But the problem was, I didn’t have a creative director anymore.

And I think we all need a creative director to make us do better work.

To push us beyond what’s comfortable.

Even if it’s only someone in our own mind.

So I had to create my own creative director.

And I found three people who, put together, were better than me.

An art director, a copywriter and an account man.

Gordon Smith would never get seduced, as I would, by complicated marketing logic.

Working with Gordon is like working with a copy of The Sun.

I’ll spend ages working on the strategy, the tactics, the research findings, the consumer insight, the brand personality.

Then I explain it all to Gordon and show him the ad.

He says, “Yeah, but it ain’t funny.”

And I think, shit he’s right.

Working with Gordon reminds me that we’re not in marketing.

We’re in advertising.

All the logic in the world won’t work if that ad’s dull.

Being reminded of that makes me do better ads.

Paul Grubb was a trainee copywriter from Sheffield.

I was briefing him on a TV ad we had to do for Knirps umbrellas.
I said the brief was ’structural integrity’.
Grubby said, what’s that?
I said, “It’ll bend but it won’t break. So we need a strapline that says that. But we have to lock it into our brand. No one knows the names of umbrellas, so we need a mnemonic.”
Grubby said, what’s a mnemonic?
I said a catchy device to make the name stick in your memory, a gimmick.
Grubby said, like what?
I said, “I dunno something like….er….you can break a brolley but you can’t k-nacker a K-nirps. Do something like that.”
Grubby said, what’s wrong with that. I like that?
I said, “Don’t be daft, you can’t do that, it’s swearing.”
Then I thought, hang on, maybe he’s right.

Grubby reacted the way a punter reacts to a copy of the Sun.

It’s funny, it made me laugh, that’s good.

Being reminded of that makes me do better ads.

Mike Greenlees was the Chief Exec at GGT.

When we were starting the agency we were doing a pitch for a beer account.

I wrote a campaign and showed it to Mike.

He said, “It’s a very good beer campaign, I’ll have no trouble selling it. But it doesn’t scare me. Can’t you do something that scares me?”

Sometimes I forget that.

That consumers aren’t interested in the subtle differences between ad campaigns.

We’re competing with everything else in the media.

Newspapers, TV, internet, magazines, films, music, everything.

If we’re too comfortable, then what we’re doing won’t be different.

And if it isn’t different, it won’t stand out.

And if it doesn’t stand out, it has no chance of working.

I need reminding of that.

It makes me do better work.

So I put those three guys together in my head, and made them my creative director.

If they all agreed on something, I’d over-ride my own opinion.

Because I had a creative director made up of three people who thought like Sun readers.

They liked to laugh, they gave a genuine consumer response.

And they weren’t seduced by marketing bullshit, as I can be.

So, I’m not so sure I go along with respect as my motivation for choosing a creative director.

Personally I look for someone who can make me better.

And if you can’t find one, build your own.