A few days ago I got an email asking if I wanted to be on a Channel 4 documentary about advertising.

Apparently the government is worried about all the expected Bulgarian immigrants next year.

They want to do advertising to run in Bulgaria, to dissuade people from coming to the UK.

So I said I was happy to talk about it before I agreed.

They came to the agency and set up their camera equipment in one of the conference rooms.

Before we started they asked me to sign a release form.

I said “Let’s see what you shoot first, then I’ll decide.”

While they were interviewing me, I asked them what they did.

They said they were an advertising agency.

The interviewer said he was a copywriter.

He said he was famous for launching “hashtag creativetops” and “hashtag crazylife”.

I didn’t get the actual names because I was confused.

What did that have to do with advertising?

I asked the other guy what he did.

He had huge glasses, skinny jeans, pointy shoes, and he used a lot of long jargony words that I didn’t understand.

He said he was an account man.

Then they got out the posters they’d done.

The first one was a poster of Tower Bridge with the words “OPEN” and “SHUT”, but “OPEN” was crossed out.

Then they showed me a copy of the famous WW2 poster, but with the line “KEEP CALM AND STAY HOME”.

Finally they showed me a poster with the headline “WE DON’T NEED U IN THE UK”.

Then they asked me what I thought.

I said “This is a wind-up, right?”

They asked me what I meant.

I said “You can’t possibly work in an ad agency with posters that bad. Is this candid camera?”

And they started to get upset.

They said the posters might not be very creative by UK standards, but Bulgaria was a poor country.

I said it wasn’t that these weren’t creative posters.

It was that they didn’t even communicate.

For a start, if it’s a poor country, how many Bulgarians will get a reference to an ironic use of a British WW2 poster?

Second, how can you run an ad depending on an ability to understand puns (‘U’ meaning ‘You’) to an audience whose native language isn’t English?

Third, ‘OPEN’ and ‘SHUT’ is another pun: expecting Bulgarians to get the reference between the bridge and the UK.

And all of that is before we get anywhere near the fact that this advertising is actually much closer to graffiti.

The kind of stuff you find scrawled on walls, not a reasoned argument about immigration.

So I stood up and took off the mic.

They said “Okay we’ll be honest. This is actually a satirical show where the humour comes from the interviewees not being in on the joke.”

Oh, okay, I get it.

This is kind of like Sacha Barron Cohen’s characters (Ali G – etc) where we laugh at the mugs for being taken in by him.

They assured me that it wasn’t.

But it so obviously was.

I don’t blame these guys for trying it on.

Good luck if you can get away with it.

But two things really worried me about the whole thing.

These guys assured me they’d already done three or four interviews at other agencies and no one had noticed that it was a send-up.

They dressed and talked like absolute clichés, and no one noticed.

But much worse, the ads were pre-student level and no one noticed.

Everyone took them seriously as an ad agency answering a problem.

If I was a client, I’d find that very worrying.

When my son was very small he asked me about death.

We were driving along on a sunny day.

Suddenly the concept hit him with the weight of a cartoon anvil.

I heard his little voice from the back seat say “Daddy, I don’t want to die”.

Of course he didn’t.

None of us do.

We just get used to the idea over time.

We stop thinking about it.

If the concept of death is difficult for grownups, what must it be like for a small child?

You’ve just discovered what a fantastic and wonderful thing life is.

Then you find out it’s all going to be taken away.

You’ll lose everything you’ve got.

Nothing but blackness for eternity.

Unless you’re deeply religious, in which case you have all the stories about the various heavens.

How the next life is going to be better than this one.

But I’m not religious, so I couldn’t tell my son any of those stories.

I’m not a believer.

I go on evidence, which is what British philosophy was based on: empiricism.

Which means I’m also not an atheist.

Because atheism is the belief that there is definitely no afterlife, that this life is all there is.

I say that’s a belief because we don’t know that.

We don’t know there isn’t an afterlife anymore than we know there is.

But everyone seems terrified to accept ‘don’t know’ as a position.

Not me.

I’m happy to admit I don’t know, until I do know.

Not to pretend to know.

So I’m agnostic.

Which is another word for keeping an open mind.

Descartes thought doubt was the strongest philosophical tool.

In fact, some philosophers translate “Cogito ergo sum” as “I doubt, therefore I am”.

Certainly scepticism has been the most valuable philosophical tool  since Socrates.

Scepticism is what the Enlightenment was based on.

But all this is very difficult to explain to my son in the car.

He’s small and confused.

It would be easy to reassure him with fairytales about paradise.

It would keep him quiet for the time being.

But it would also be an anaesthetic to stop him thinking.

And one day he’s going to have that question crop up again.

Then he’ll find I lied, because I don’t believe it.

So that isn’t a good solution.

It’s a classic advertising problem.

How do you take something very complicated and reduce it to something very simple, while still retaining the core truth?

You always have two ingredients: the product and the audience.

You have to explain the one in terms of the other.

So I said to him “You like Sonic the Hedgehog don’t you?”

He nodded, he’d play Sonic all day if he could.

I said “You know how much fun it is getting through a level on Sonic?”

He nodded again.

I said “You know how, when you get to the end of one level, you move up to the next level?”

He smiled, we were in a world he understood now.

I said “But you don’t know what that next level’s going to be like until you’ve finished this level, do you?”

He thought about that.

I said “I think that’s what death is like. We’re having a great time on this level and when we’ve finished this level we go on to the next level. But we won’t know what the next level is like until we get there.”

And he thought about that, then he gradually lightened up.

I’d told him what I think the truth is, but in a way that worked for him.

I hadn’t lied just to shut him up.

I think that’s how it works, in advertising or anything else.

Gordon Smith didn’t go to art school.

He started at 16 as a runner in an ad agency.

Then he managed to get a job in the studio, then a junior art director, then senior art director, then head of art, then creative director.

He was telling me how he used his head to work his way up.

How he kept his eyes open, who he learned from, what he learned.

And you could hear, Gordon is naturally creative.

Creativity being another name for street smarts.

One particular thing he told me highlighted that.

Gordon remembered one of the other art directors in particular.

This art director used to save all the best ad layouts he saw.

When he saw a layout he liked, in a magazine or a newspaper, he’d tear it out.

He had them all in a big plans chest in his office.

He had them sorted by category: perfume ads, car ads, beer ads, food ads, holiday ads, clothing ads.

Gordon said this art director thought this gave him a start point when it came to layouts.

Whenever he got a brief, he went to the plans chest and got out the best layouts in that sector.

Then he studied them before he started work.

So if he got a perfume brief, he got out all the best perfume layouts to look at.

If he got a car brief he got out all the best car layouts to look at.

And so on.

And Gordon remembers watching this and thinking “No mate, you’ve got it the wrong way round.”

By all means look at other ads, but not to put you in the same ballpark as them.

Just the opposite.

If you’ve got a perfume brief, you should be looking at car layouts.

If you’ve got a car brief, you should be looking at perfume layouts.

You should be looking to go against type, not according to type.

The counterpoint is what’s exciting and different.

The tension between the expected and the unexpected.

What we call cognitive dissonance, nowadays.

If you’re doing a perfume ad and you look at all the other perfume layouts, you’ll just end up doing what they’ve all done.

You’ll just look like another perfume ad.

You won’t be different.

You won’t stand out.

Bu if you’ve got to do a perfume ad and you look at all the car layouts, you’ll end up doing something different to everything in the perfume sector.

You must be different.

You must stand out.

I love that because that’s exactly what they can’t teach you at art school.

Nous.

Using your loaf.

Creativity.

Nowadays all the ‘creatives’ are churned out on a conveyor belt and they all learn the same rules.

No one is the art director.

No one is the copywriter.

So everyone is the grey bit of the Venn diagram where the circles overlap.

That’s what I like about the way Gordon came up, through the mailroom.

You didn’t get an automatic entry into the creative department.

You had to keep your eyes open.

You had to spot, or make, an opportunity.

You learned predatory thinking as a way to progress.

You learned to think just the way advertising has to think.

Differentiate or die.

A while back, Robin Wight was involved in a project that needed some careful public relations handling.

The most influential man in this area is Alan Parker, founder and chairman of Brunswick PR.

So Robin said to his PA “Organise lunch at The Wolseley with Alan Parker for me, would you please?”

Robin’s PA called Alan Parker’s PA and managed to arranged lunch for the next week, when they were both available.

On the day of the lunch, Robin took all his prepared documents.

He went into the Wolseley and was shown to the table booked in his name.

And there was Alan Parker, sitting there waiting for him.

But it was the wrong Alan Parker.

It wasn’t the PR guru who ran Brunswick PR.

It was Alan Parker the film director.

The man who directed Bugsy Malone, Mississippi Burning, Midnight Express, and Evita.

This was going to be embarrassing.

What should Robin say?

Obviously Alan thought Robin had invited him to lunch to discuss shooting some commercials.

Robin realised immediately what had gone wrong.

Robin was founder and chairman of the ad agency WCRS.

In advertising the most famous Alan Parker was the director.

So, when Robin said Alan Parker, his PA naturally thought he meant this one.

This Alan Parker was the default setting for advertising people.

Unless specified otherwise.

And Robin hadn’t specified otherwise, so it wasn’t her fault.

Robin thought the best thing to do was carry on with lunch while he worked out what to say.

The food was good, and they had a very enjoyable lunch.

But eventually Robin thought he’d better confess.

He told Alan the truth, it had been a mix up, he was sorry if he’d wasted his time, sorry but there wasn’t a project for him.

Strangely enough, Alan Parker didn’t seem disappointed.

In fact he smiled and said “Phew, that’s a relief. I was wondering how I was going to let you down. I’m sitting here thinking, how do I tell you I don’t do advertising anymore?

Especially after you’ve bought me such a nice lunch.”

Robin said he didn’t understand, if Alan didn’t do advertising anymore, why did he agree to come and have lunch with him?

Alan Parker said “When my PA asked if I wanted to have lunch with Robin Wight I thought she said Robin Wright, the Hollywood actress.

I thought she might want to talk to me about a film.”

So Alan Parker thought he was going to lunch with a Hollywood actress.

Robin Wright, who starred in Forrest Gump and was married to Sean Penn.

Because Alan’s world wasn’t advertising anymore, it was Hollywood.

And in Hollywood that’s the default setting for the name Robin Wight.

Which is why he turned up for the lunch.

And that’s a great lesson for all of us, especially doing we do.

We think everyone’s head is where our head is.

And that’s very dangerous when we’re writing ads.

In fact, particularly when we’re writing ads.

If we think everyone’s head is where our head is, we’re just talking to ourselves.

Joseph Bell was a physician at Edinburgh University in the 1870s.

He constantly taught his students observation and deduction.

To notice every tiny detail and draw conclusions.

Most people of course don’t do this.

Everything passes us by as we live life on autopilot.

This is what made Joseph Bell different.

He noticed everything.

From what someone was wearing, to the way they walked, to the mud on their shoes.

Jus by observation and deduction he could tell where someone was from and what their occupation was.

At that time the police methods were crude and clumsy.

So Joseph Bell brought his powers of logic to criminal investigation.

For instance, in 1878 the police in Edinburgh enlisted his help in a domestic incident.

A young woman had been found dead.

There was a strong smell of gas and the police concluded carbon monoxide poisoning from a leaky gas pipe.

But Joseph Bell noticed something no one else did.

A tiny patch of vomit on her pillow.

And he noticed the vomit didn’t smell of gas, as it should have.

Bell suspected it wasn’t carbon monoxide poisoning at all.

He discounted cyanide, strychnine, and arsenic, as they would all leave traces.

He suspected opium, as the only poison that wouldn’t leave a trace.

And tests on the vomit proved him correct.

The husband confessed, and was executed.

Joseph Bell demonstrated to his students that observation was crucial.

Once, he showed his class a tumbler containing a liquid.

He told them to taste it so they would recognise it.

To prove it was okay to taste, he touched his own finger to the liquid, then to his tongue.

As each of the students did the same they pulled grotesque faces at the foul taste.

They noticed Joseph Bell was the only one not grimacing in disgust.

Bell said “The real lesson was about observation. If you had been watching you would have seen that I placed my index finger in the drug, but my middle finger on my tongue.” 

He hadn’t tasted the disgusting liquid at all.

Joseph Bell shunned publicity and would have remained unknown.

Except for one of his students.

For four years this young man studied under Bell and learned everything he could.

Careful observation, thorough analysis, reasoned deduction.

That young student was Arthur Conan Doyle.

Several years later, Conan Doyle wrote a series of stories based on what he’d learned in that class.

And he based the main character on Joseph Bell.

Sherlock Holmes.

Stories about a man uniquely capable of spotting what is right in front of all our eyes, but we just can’t see it.

And what Joseph Bell tried to drum into his students became Sherlock Holmes’s mantra throughout the books.

Something we could all benefit from learning.

“You see, but you do not observe.”

Sheryl Sandberg is Chief Operating Officer of Facebook.

She earns around $26 million a year.

She was talking about what women need to do to get to the top of their profession.

She said they needed to learn from men.

Not that men are smarter, they’re not.

That’s the problem.

She said it wasn’t men who were holding women back.

It was women who were holding women back.

Women were smarter than men and that was the problem.

Women would listen more carefully to what was said.

Women would respond more thoughtfully.

Women would pay more attention, answer the question, solve the problem.

Men wouldn’t do any of that.

Men weren’t listening to anyone else.

Men were just concentrating on what they wanted.

And it worked.

Because it meant they weren’t as restricted as women.

She said she’d had a great example of this herself.

She’d been doing a speech to a couple of hundred men and women.

After the talk she was chatting to one of the women.

She asked her what she thought of the speech.

The woman said “I learned I’m going to start putting my hand up even when I don’t think it’s right.”

Sheryl Sandberg asked her what she meant.

She said “See, you probably didn’t even notice.

At the end of your talk you said you’d take questions.

So everyone, men and women, raised their hands.

After about twenty minutes, you said you’d only take two more questions.

So, after you’d taken two questions, the women all stopped raising their hands.

But the men kept putting their hands up and you kept on answering their questions.

The women obeyed the rules and didn’t get their questions answered.

The men broke the rules and got their questions answered.

So that’s what I learned.

I have to raise my hand even when I think it’s wrong.”

And Sheryl Sandberg was gobsmacked.

Because she hadn’t even noticed what she’d done.

She hadn’t noticed what all the women present had done.

And she is a woman, and a champion of women’s rights.

If she hadn’t noticed, what chance did other women have?

No wonder men had more power.

They had more power because they didn’t ask anyone else’s permission.

They just went ahead and did what they wanted.

And they weren’t as scared of being wrong as the women were.

For them, getting the result was more important than being right.

And that’s what Sheryl Sandberg meant by the biggest problem for women being women.

The only thing stopping them was themselves.

They were too smart.

They listened out for all the rules.

They very carefully paid attention to every detail.

They worried about being correct.

And that, Sheryl Sandberg said, is the problem.

Something everyone can learn from.

It’s not thinking.

It’s over-thinking.

In Soho is a pub called the John Snow.

Who is he, why is a pub named after him, and why in Soho?

It all concerns the cholera outbreak of 1854.

Five hundred people died in two weeks.

For thousands of years, conventional wisdom had it that all diseases were spread by ‘miasma’.

Foul air, bad smells.

But John Snow didn’t buy it.

He decided to get upstream and investigate the problem logically.

So first he did what no one else thought to do.

He researched the problem.

He marked on a map where all the victims lived.

Then he looked for a connection.

Right there, in the centre of all the dots, in Broad Street, was a water pump.

He thought ‘germs’ might be coming from this pump.

He presented his findings to the authorities, but they were locked into the ‘miasma’ explanation.

He proved all the victims took water from the Broad Street pump.

But the authorities wouldn’t accept it.

Even though Snow’s ‘germ’ theory was validated by all the evidence.

Because it didn’t fit the answer they wanted: ‘miasma’.

They said Soho was ten feet lower than the rest of London, so that’s why the bad air settled there.

They said the cholera wasn’t caused by ‘germs’ in the water.

It was caused by ‘miasma’: bad, foul-smelling air.

Snow was desperate.
He needed a dramatic demonstration.

So he took the handle off the Broad Street pump.

Now no one could get any water from it.

The cholera epidemic stopped.

The source of the problem was that in those days there were no sewers.

Everyone had cesspits under their houses, so they lived on top of all their waste.

Soho had become so cramped that the cesspits were overflowing.

So the authorities began emptying the cesspits into the Thames.

Right by where the local water company was taking water for the Broad Street pump.

Ten years after John Snow’s death the authorities were finally forced to admit he’d been correct.

His ‘germ’ theory was right and the ‘miasma’ explanation was wrong.

John Snow is now recognised as the founding father of epidemiology.

The science of using patterns and statistics to make deductions.

Why investigation should come before treatment.

For me it’s appropriate that the John Snow pub is in Soho.

That’s where most of advertising is centred.

That pub should remind us to come at problems out of a question, not out of a ready-formed answer.

First investigate the problem.

By doing that we get upstream and change the problem.

And that must automatically give us a different solution.

Broad Street is now called Broadwick Street.

And right there, opposite the pub, is a monument to John Snow.

A water pump.

But there’s one thing different about this particular water pump.

It hasn’t got a handle.

On American hospital-based TV shows you hear the term ‘triage’.

As in “Nurse, get this patient to triage immediately!”

I always thought it meant emergency treatment.

Actually it doesn’t mean that.

The idea of triage is to ration out treatment efficiently, when resources are insufficient.

Which is very different.

The term comes from the French verb “trier”, meaning to separate, sift or select.

It was coined in World War One by French doctors.

The wounded were divided into 3 categories:

1) Those who were likely to live, with or without care.

2) Those who were likely to die, with or without care.

3) Those for whom immediate care might make a difference.

Obviously category 3 is the one they needed to give priority to.

So they put their effort where they could make a difference.

I’ve found it’s exactly like this with students.

Put your effort where you think you might make a difference.

Before you give feedback you must perform triage.

Divide the students into 3 categories:

1) Those who are so good they don’t need any help;

2) Those who are so bad you can’t help them;

3) Those who might benefit from your help.

All students ask you to crit their book.

What they actually mean is “Tell me my book is good.”

Do you honestly tell them what you think?

Even if it’s bad?

If so, will they get benefit, or will they just be dispirited and upset?

This is when you perform triage on the student before giving feedback.

In category 1 there is no problem.

You like their work so you can be honest and pleasant.

Category 2 could be a problem.

You don’t like any of the work, so all your criticism will be negative.

Will that help?

Probably not.

So there’s no point in honest (painful) feedback in category 2.

Just be nice and get it over quickly.

Category 3 is the most difficult.

They may well benefit from your honest (painful) criticism.

But you may need to give them more help.

Are you prepared to see them more than once in order to help?

If not, then it’s the same as category 2: damage limitation.

Be polite and get it over painlessly.

So the start point is the same as triage in medicine.

Is it worth the pain?

Will the treatment make a difference?

If not, don’t start.

If you think the student can be helped, and you’re prepared to make the effort, then go ahead.

But it’s not enough to tell them the work is bad.

You have to tell them what’s wrong, and where it could be better, and how to do it.

And you have to see them several times to check their work’s getting better.

You have limited time for all this in your working day.

You’ve got another (paying) job to attend to.

So don’t start it unless you’re prepared to commit the time.

But I’ve found, if you get the right students, it’s worth it.

Because when you train students, you train yourself to be a creative director.

In 1963 John Kennedy Toole wrote “A Confederacy of Dunces”.

It was different to a conventional novel.

He sent it to a publisher he admired, Simon and Schuster.

The editor in charge felt it needed serious changes.

He wrote to Toole:

“More work is required. The various threads must be strong and meaningful all the way through—not merely episodic and then wittily pulled together.

In other words, there must be a point to everything you have in the book, a real point, not just amusingness that’s forced to figure itself out.”

John Kennedy Toole tried to make the changes.

For two years he tried rewriting his book to please the publisher.

But nothing he did was good enough.

Eventually the publisher wrote to him:

“There is another problem: with all its wonderfulness the book does not have a reason; it’s a brilliant exercise in invention, but it isn’t really about anything. And that’s something no one can do anything about.”

That was the end as far as the publishers were concerned.

John Kennedy Toole became depressed and began drinking heavily.

No one would publish “A Confederacy of Dunces”.

And in 1969, aged 31, he committed suicide.

Years later, his mother found the abandoned manuscript on top of a cupboard in his bedroom.

She decided to try to fulfil her son’s wish to get it published.

Over the next five years she sent it to seven publishers.

Each one turned it down.

No one would publish “A Confederacy of Dunces”.

Finally, in 1976, she found an author who was teaching at the local University.

His name was Walker Percy.

She asked him to read the book, he refused.

She begged him to read the book, he refused.

She badgered him to read the book until, eventually, just to get rid of her, he agreed to read it.

He was hoping that it would be so bad that he could stop after the first page.

But it didn’t turn out like that.

“I started to read, I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity; surely it was not possible that it was so good.”

And he realised this book was truly different.

Walker Percy felt he must get it published.

And for three years he wrote, and phoned, and met, and pestered everyone he could think of.

And everyone turned him down.

No one would publish “A Confederacy of Dunces”.

Eventually, in 1980, he managed to nag a small local publisher into printing just 2,000 copies.

And, despite the tiny print run, people started to read it.

The very next year, in 1981, “A Confederacy of Dunces” won the Pulitzer Prize.

Probably the highest award any book can win.

John Kennedy Toole’s name now sits alongside other Pulitzer Prize winners: John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and John Updike.

Since its publication “A Confederacy of Dunces” has sold more than two million copies and been translated into eighteen languages around the world.

It is now recognised as a true masterpiece.

But the ironic part for me is what we can learn from the title of the book.

John Kennedy Toole took it from a line in an essay written by Jonathan Swift over 200 years earlier:

“When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in a confederacy against him.”

When my children were very small, my wife and I went to some parenting classes.

I still remember the best thing I heard there.

It was very simple, the best things usually are.

In all our interactions with children we must tick three boxes.

We must be firm.

We must be consistent.

We must be positive.

I looked back over all my interactions with my children and realised there was good and bad news.

I was always firm, I was always consistent.

But I wasn’t positive.

Then I looked at my wife’s interactions.

Cathy was always positive.

But she wasn’t firm or consistent.

I said, okay, in which case we’ve got to make sure the kids get what they need from both of us.

I’ll always be firm and consistent, you always be positive.

That way we’ll always tick all three boxes.

And that’s what we tried to do.

Meanwhile I thought that isn’t a bad template for interaction in other situations.

Particularly a creative director.

It seems to me that a creative director needs to tick those three boxes, too:

Firm. Consistent. Positive.

Take them one at a time.

1) Firm: it’s no good a creative director being like a jelly.

Someone who looks at your work and can’t make up their mind.

The job of a creative director is guidance.

They need to be sure of their opinion and the facts it’s based on.

That’s what they’re paid for.

The purpose of a creative director is so that the creatives don’t have to listen to every single opinion from everyone else.

The planner, the account man, the client, media, traffic, the photographer, the director, the producer.

If they listen to everyone they’ll get confused.

They need to know they’re listening to one bloke: the creative director.

Then they can focus on that.

Everything else (input from all those other people) is the creative director’s responsibility.

That’s why he has to be firm.

2) Consistent: the creative director can’t change with the wind.

That isn’t to say they can’t ever change.

Just that they can’t keep changing the goalposts.

They’re paid to take responsibility, they’re paid to lead.

That means making sure their opinion is based on solid ground.

Ground that won’t shift unless there’s a really good reason.

No one wants to work with someone who’s intransigent.

Who won’t change no matter what.

But everyone likes to know where they stand.

That the thing they’ve just agreed today will stay agreed tomorrow.

The rules won’t keep changing arbitrarily.

3) Positive: you can’t just turn work down and walk away.

In telling a team what they’ve done wrong, you need to tell them where they should be going.

Give them a direction.

So they don’t just leave your office confused and dispirited.

They leave it feeling energised.

Understanding why what they did was wrong, but more importantly knowing what they need to do next.

So the meeting didn’t end on a negative note, but a positive one.

In short, just remember what you wanted from a creative director when you were a writer or an art director.

Then be that.

For me, all I ever wanted was someone to tick those three boxes.

Firm. Consistent. Positive.