Marketing God Father: 63 Years of Wisdom in 3 Hours (best thing you’ll listen to)

34:41He was like, I've never thought of the word brand. And you've never once said, we take better care of you. You know, the stupid thing with Abaddon is they think if you write, we take better care of you under their brand name, that's done it. Now everybody thinks, oh, we take better care of you. No, nobody does. Yes. The pundits know you're only making that up. Yes. You know, the pundits aren't stupid. They know forever people make up some meaningless line just to get out of a meeting with the client. And the client can say, well, look, I did say we take better care of you on the ad. that's his job the cmo back at back at the the marketing guy back at there he wants to be able to say to his chief exec well look i did say in the brand here we take better care of you as if everybody is stupid robots who will go oh they said that we take better care of you oh they must but people don't believe it people don't believe it they don't believe it unless what you've said is you know the very first of these hecate always says his favorite ad and I'm a member in our generation.

35:38It was the first time we'd ever seen an ad that actually spoke just ordinary common sense. It said, you're going back, blimey, years and years and years now, it was a massive snowstorm and thick snow, American ad, black and white in those days, in Neff Color TV. And it said, how does the man who gets to the snow cloud drive to the snow cloud? And you hear the sound of an engine. and gradually a little Volkswagen Beetle pops up and stops there and the guy gets out and gets in the snowplough and starts driving the snowplough. And I didn't need all that claim about longevity and economically and everything else.

36:24How does the guy who gets to the snowplough drive to the snowplough? It was just so much like that's a pub. The test for me has always been, will they repeat this in the pub? Would I repeat this in the pub? Yeah. Would you say that to your mates across the bar in the pub? Yeah. As a bloke who drives a snowplow, I drive to the snowplow. That's exactly the sort of thing you'd say to your mates in the pub. That is so delicious. A sort of common... How do you drive a plow, how do you get to the snowplow? Now, what do I say to my mates in the pub before they, apparently they say, we take more care of you.

37:01Would I say that to my mates? No, good luck. Yes. But I'd say, hey, you know this, man, that's the bloke who drives the snowplow, drives to the snowplow. That's the sort of thing you do. Oh, my God, that's so good. And, like, so I think another one of your things in, I can't remember which book it was, but it's, I think brand is the answer. What's the question? Is that, have I said that right? Well, I think it's one. That's me saying that's not thinking, it's just knee jerk. Before I even heard the question, Brian's the answer. Yes. Okay. Stupid people. Stupid people. So what are some really good questions to ask?

37:42I know it's case by case to really get into the function. What's the function? You used to ask at the beginning of every brief, it used to say, this is going back, you know, dinosaur times. Yeah. In my times. the

38:01used to be a line the first line on the brief used to say what's the purpose of this advertising why are we advertising and then when you got to the end of the brief you'd look back and see if that really was the purpose of the advertising and if your whole brief had led you to these are the category norms and at the end of it so the categories obeying all the category norms hadn't led you back to we must stand out from our category. Yeah? Well, then go back and now write a brief again, obeying the function. John. If you build a ship, what's the function? It must go. John Hegarty talks about the freedom of a tight brief.

38:50What's your thoughts on that? No, I mean, of course, it's like, you know, it's anything. isn't it like i said with a ship what's the what's the first thing you do with it this ship must go fast no the first thing you do is it must float a car what's the first thing you must go down the road because if if once you've you've got the tight the tight brief then how can i improve on that what's what is a really good brief like if you were to write a brief like what's what one two three things would you should you have in that so what's what is the purpose of this what's the purpose of the advertising yep how we're gonna do that yep what makes us different yep how we're gonna do that those four things well you can put more if you want but basically we've got a third you in a comer in a commercial world there's around about 200 the average and four hours viewing the average consumer well you know it's different in knowing it in a you know We'll move it later on into an online world, but the original one, to make life easy, used to be four hours viewing the average consumer, TV viewing, so that's about 100, 200 ads at night.

40:04You've got 30 seconds of that. Now, if everybody's got 30 seconds, what's that, an hour and a half? And you've got 30 seconds. and it's an hour and a half out of four hours viewing and you've got 30 seconds. Now, do we think in your 30 seconds, droning on about brand purpose is likely to make you stand out from that four hours viewing tonight? Or do we think there might be something more important that your first job is? Bill Birnbach said, if no one notices your advertising, everything else is academic. Aira is an AI communication booking platform where restaurants can manage all inquiries, bookings.

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42:21Now, here's the numbers, the generous numbers.

42:26£26 billion was spent last year in the UK on all forms of advertising and marketing of that. 4 % was remembered positively. 7 % was remembered negatively. 89 % wasn't even noticed or remembered. So the problem isn't the 4 % of being liked. The problem is the 89 % of not being noticed or remembered. That's 19 billion quid pissed away. If you're not noticed or remembered, why are you even bothering? You're doing it because your boss said to the marketing director, here's five million quid, go and do some advertising. And you think, at least I've spent it and I haven't embarrassed myself. Nobody's complained about it.

43:13And so the best thing is you've spent five million quid and nobody's complained. And that's what you aimed for in your job. Nobody complained. And 4%, what's that, one out of 20. You've got a one out of 20 shot at being noticed or remembered. I wanted to ask you about when you say the idea versus execution, when you say you'll never make a bad idea better by good execution and you'll never spoil a great idea by bad execution, if I've said that right. Like, yeah, that, when I read that, I was like, wow, I need to explore that. Talk to me about that. Because there's this whole thing of idea versus execution.

43:54Okay, remember, sure, remember most of what I say is what's useful for the creative department. and most of what I say you know what it's like online there'll always be someone who'll say ah but wait a minute I remember back in 2003 someone in Lithuania wrote this out that yeah mate one out of a thousand I'm not into the I'm not into the 19 times 19 out of a thousand when you've spotted when someone said something I'm into mainly what will work here yeah like It's like a football pitch. For me, football is a great analogy for most of this. I want you in that position when the ball comes across so you stick it in the net and you'll say, well, yeah, but I remember in a game seven seasons ago, someone stood there and the ball came across and they miskicked it.

44:44Yeah, that was right. That did happen, but 99 times it didn't. Yes. And what I'm going for is the mass of the times that it works. Yeah? It's no good. And what you'll do is you'll think you'll make yourself clever by being negative in finding the one out of a hundred when it hasn't. Well, no, I haven't got time for that. It's never going to work a thousand times. It's never going to be perfect. I'm going to go with what's mainly going to work, a blunt instrument. I'm not looking for a rapier here. This is a blunt instrument. I need to get it heard and remembered amongst everybody else and everything else that's going on.

45:22And for that, I need a big, blunt, simple instrument. A big, blunt, simple. Just in terms of thinking. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no. I understand. Let's not say you've got to be stupid and gross. Clever is way, way better, obviously. But give me some examples of when you used your big, blunt, simple instrument. Arist on and on and on. Hello, Toshiko Toshiba. We did years and years when we got that Morrison's account. We did this advertising forum. and then I left the agency and they hadn't used that account, that line that we wrote for them. That was 40 years ago and they've just had to bring it back now because their advertising looks like all other supermarket advertising.

46:08So their money is because no one knows they spend their money except they had to bring our old line back and now on the end of every ad it says more reasons, more reasons, more reasons, more reasons to shop up, more reasons. that they'll need more reasons more reasons to shop at Morrison's that we wrote 40 years ago they've had to bring it back because and people say oh it's a jingle it's crude well yeah mate you're not making art here this is business this isn't you know we're not the people who will run off the cans to get their little gold award because they made a bit of art yeah what do you think of cans oh please go on well it's it's nothing to do with what we do it's nothing to do with what we do on several criteria awards has become a very bad thing because you don't now do the ads to work in the real world you do them to win an award which is a different audience it's 10 people on the jury instead of 50 million people out in the street point one that's why awards are generally bad point two Cannes in particular It's an international awards.

47:21And I'm not doing advertising in the UK for international audience. I'm doing it for English people. I'm not even doing it for Americans or Canadians or New Zealanders or Australians. This is English people. The jokes, they will understand. The Americans won't get these jokes. So I was on an awards jury and David Abbott, an economist post that came up. and David Abbott had written a line that said, you know that Katie Price used to be called Jordan? Yeah. And she was on page three and that. And it said, you mentioned Jordan, someone thinks of a Middle Eastern country. Someone mentions Jordan, you think of a Middle Eastern country with a GDP of 32%.

48:08Right? And an American guy on one side of me and a Canadian woman on the other, And they said, Michael Jordan, why has he got Michael Jordan in the economy state? And she said, I don't know. What's Michael Jordan got? And he got thrown out. Because a Canadian and an American don't get what Jordan and page three in the sun in the UK. I don't want international people judging my advertising tanks. I'm not doing it for them. As soon as I'm doing it for international people, that's done for an awards jury, not for English people. They don't play only fools and horses on TV in America. They don't understand the language.

48:48I was doing a lecture to some people in Germany, business people, and at the end of it, one of them stood up and said, we don't understand this new demographic you are talking about, punters. And I got it, mate. I understand. But to be fair, I don't do my work for Germans. I do my work for Brits. I mean, there's a brick that doesn't understand what punters mean. Brits understand me because that's who I'm talking to. And I talk in working class English because that's what I learned had worked really, really well in America. When I left, all British advertising was middle class and had to be posh and everybody had to sound like Penelope Keith and wear a suit and tie and everything like that.

49:31And what I learned in America was what worked over there was these kids from Brooklyn doing advertising. And everybody and the audience who were all blue collar responded massively to their kind of advertising talking to them. And I thought, when I go back to England, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to do advertising for the middle class, for the lower middle class and the working class, people like me, which is half the country. And that's all I need, half the country. and most of the clients that I will talk to will be people that sell to them. That's working class. It probably won't be White Trost and it probably won't be Harrods and it probably won't be Fortnum and Mason.

50:10It will be Marks and Spencers and Asda and Tesco's and Sainsbury's. People are taught my language. On the American thing, one of my favourite Oscar Wilde quotes is between the difference in the US and the UK is we're two nations divided by a common language, which I think is so interesting. But the point about the, which I learned when I was doing the peanut butter business, right, is, you know, we were in a nice office in Central, and we're coming up with all these ideas and stuff. And like, look, I'll admit, everyone on the team was middle class. It was private school wankers, lovely people, including myself.

50:52But like, that's what it was. and we were coming up with all these ideas and then for like these you know pithy slogans and all this stuff of like how to active activate the brand how to put it out there and then one like we were doing going to stores and um uh going out to stores and we went to check the stocks available and we went to a retail store uh retail park outside where there's the Sainsbury's outside just outside Manchester, right? The shelf was full of our peanut butter. I would say fuck all, right? And suddenly as I came out, I was like, and sort of you sort of look around and it goes to us.

51:32It was like everyone there was working class. And I've written a thing because I write a lot of like, if you want to come up with MPD, new product development, don't sit and fucking sew a house. Go and have your meeting in a Sainsbury's car park in Rotherham. right not to disparage rotherham but like and that's so fascinating so this working class you're working because you grew up in barking right um how does that talk to me a bit more about how that gives you an unfair advantage like well the um i talked to my son about this he's middle class and uh i mean middle class don't get me wrong it's not bad but they're different The difference is if you were advertising Harrods, you would give that to someone who's middle class.

52:19You wouldn't give it to me. But if you were advertising Sainsbury's or Tesco's, you'd be better off giving that to me because I took the language of the market. The working class gives you is you have to use your brains a lot more because it's not exactly a hostile environment, but everything isn't laid on and you're not as cosseted as you are if you're middle class and went to a private school the the um i'll give you for you you come out of your front door same with the kids in brooklyn i used to know they were they were very similar in as much as you have to be thinking the minute you come out your front door who's going to have me over what's what's what's going to happen here i know you know i'm not i'm not buying a cheap second hand car how's he going to have me over and we're going to make sure I don't get had over uh you you've got to be thinking all the while and if you're middle class you don't for instance here's I give for instance my son when he was when he went here when he was little very tiny he came back to the school one day posh hamstered school and he said um he's really upset and I said what's up he said this boy at school has been making fun of my name and he'd been calling me Lee Trot Fat Pot And I said, all right, well, go back and make fun of his name, Mitha.

53:42And he said, I said, you can do that, can't you? And he said, no, can't, Dad. I didn't go to a rough school like you went to. Blimey, we learned that growing up in there. I said, you know, what's his name? And he said, Bimini Soyinka. And I said, we never had anything as good as that to work with. I said, Bimini Soyinka? I could do that in fun. I mean, what are we doing? Bim, bimini, bim, bimini, bim, bim, chero. Your name's really crappy, but not as crappy as you. And that, growing up working class, what that allows you to do, you think is rough, but immediately now, as soon as I get a product, I know how to play with their name to get it remembered.

54:25All that is is a mnemonic. You're learning mnemonics in a way in your playground, which you never had to learn growing up mnemonics in the middle class. I think also, so I've got two sets of mates. So I've got my mates I went to posh school with. But I've got my mate Raz and Squelch. His name's actually Squelch. He's fucking hilarious. They're my two best mates. It's literally just in France for them. And when I hang out with their mates, I think they're naturally just so witty. And I don't know, some of them are labourers. You have to be. for like and and i think the working this is maybe a too broad brush a brushstroke term but like they're naturally just so fucking witty and you know my brother works for um marix which is a like a fertile investment firm and he's like some of the traders there's a melting pot right so you've got the working class guys and the private school guys and they're all in the city so the working class guys make way more money because they're just faster on the feet they're sharper they're or, you know, I think it's just something I haven't really explored before.

55:30But it's like when I hang out with those guys, like Raz and Squelch and they're all their pals, they're so witty, like so fast. And it's interesting when you say when you've got to walk out of your house, you've got to be fast. Well, you don't think it because it's from day one when you're born, you just grow up like that. Everybody's like that. Your uncles and your mates at school. And you won't have any friends if you're not. You just, you just, everybody's funny. You know? And you don't even think it's funny. That's just how people are. I was with... Your mums and your aunties. Everybody's always joking.

56:06It's so, like, so my mate Gibbo, who's one of their mates, he's got, he's a labourer, funniest bloke I've ever met. He's got a tattoo on his chest which just says it's all loaded bollocks. Like, I don't know why, but he's, that sort of typifies who he is. And we were at this pub in Notting Hill and he was, he was doing a paint, a paint job down the road. and he came to meet us for a quick beer. Anyway, the sun was shining and this, I won't say it was, this really posh guy came up who I knew and it was just when he got his COVID vaccine. Anyway, he was wearing grey shorts, right? And anyway, and he goes, I've just got my vaccine, all this, and he'd go, just to fend off the coronavirus.

56:50And Gibbo goes, it looks like you've got the bonavirus, mate. and I looked down and his cock looked massive, but it's just that wit. Anyway, the posh guy got shot himself and just goes, I've got to go sort of thing, but that Gibbo's arresting wit and honestly now I go out with him. Like the other day, I said to him the other day, how are you feeling? How are you feeling? He goes, I'll just touch myself. Little things like that. It's so funny. And then that works so well in advertising because if at the end of it, You've done your ad and what's not fashionable amongst is branding now. They talk about brand, but they don't talk about branding.

57:32What's the difference? They think, well, okay, they'll work out because they've been to university. This can't be simple. We've got to make this as complicated as possible. So all branding is is did I remember the name of your product, right? You think, I want you to do that because when the advert's over tomorrow, you're going to go to the shops. It would be very handy if you could remember who ran that ad. Now, but we don't want to complicate you at university, guys. They don't do that. We must have brand. And what brand is is what's it all about? Our brand is about family. So we'll do an ad about family.

58:08Never mind putting the name of the product in there. We'll flush that up at the end. But if you remember family, you'll remember us. No, mate, because there's family. Yeah? So someone was saying to me about, if you're coming to working class, you naturally do, you've got so much going on all the time, you naturally do that mnemonic. You need a mnemonic, a memory device. So what's a mnemonic? A mnemonic is like a thing that's. Mnemonic is a device to make you remember things. Right, okay, yeah, yeah. For instance, they were saying to me, someone in the media department was saying, if we were doing Aldi, how would you do that?

58:52And I said, well, for me, Alderite brands at Alderite prices, right? We can't remember the line without remembering the name. I said, all right, well, what if you were doing then little? And I said, all right, for me, a little bit more for a little bit less. the the you you can't remember it without remembering the name did you how did you train yourself on this wit you don't yeah you learn it in the school when you're taking mickey out your friends names you didn't call it a mnemonic at school but that's what it was it was it was just member things and it's just any any memory device you you'll do it all the time in your life and And you particularly, if you're working class, you particularly do it all the time.

59:39So you grew up in Barking. We're now in this stunning house in Hampstead. Like your kids grew up here from what you just said, mate. Like what have you noticed? I find class culture so interesting and it's a very uniquely British thing. Like what have you learned about that sort of tension? or? Well, funny thing is, my wife's Singaporean. Yep. She had to teach me about the English middle class. Right. Now, she's English. She's not English. She's Singaporean. But she learned the English language and English middle class properly at school. I didn't. I just learned Cockney. So I learned working class.

1:00:27So Kathy had to teach me all these middle class habits. And I'd never been to restaurants before I met Kath because you're working class. You don't go to restaurants. None of my family. I've got 40 uncles and aunts in and around my land, from in and around my land. Never go to a restaurant. Why would you go to a restaurant? What, food? You'd pay four, five, six times as much for food as you could have at home. Why would you go to a restaurant? Actually, you'd go to a pub. Actually, you'd go to a cafe. But a restaurant, what, you spend three or four hours. I was eating a meal. It just didn't make any sense at all to me until Kath showed me this middle class thing.

1:01:05The middle class likes restaurants. And one of these things, and what Kath also does, is Kath speaks English correctly, BBC English. So when we go into an Uber or when we go past passport control, Kath has to translate for me with whoever we're talking to. They don't understand what I've said because Cockney doesn't work unless you're another Cockney. You look at the baristas when I'm in Starbucks and they say, what's your name? And I say, Dave. And it comes back and there's die-off on the side of the car.

1:01:45We were in the Uber car the other day and he said to me, what's your zip code? And I said, NW3 7XA. And he says, I'm looking up 7XI. there is no 7XI. And I said, no, not 7XI. Oh, 7XI. He said, 7XI, that's what I said. I said, no. And Cathy says, he said 7XI. And he said, well, why didn't he say that? Yeah. Oh, yeah. So all of those middle-class things, it's the interesting thing about the BBC, what they call the BBC accent. The BBC is actually accent-free. and Lord Reith set that – that accent didn't really exist until Lord Reith. Lord Reith was the founder of the BBC. He's the guy who was given the job of pulling all the different little broadcasters together and they all had different accents.

1:02:35So if you're from London, you couldn't understand the Geordies like that. So he said, no, we're going to have one clear accent that everybody can understand wherever you're from. Because if you think a Geordie would say, like, I'm spending thousands of pounds around town, and the Cockney has been on a sudden thousands of pounds around town, and the Queen would say, I'm spending thousands of pounds around town. And nobody understands each other. You've got to have BBC, which is thousands of pounds around town, and everybody can understand it. Do you think there's, like, accent discrimination? Like, i.e., if you were to put two...

1:03:14Not like me, particularly. But I just feel like if you put two, like, I don't think it's talked about enough, right? So they talk about all other forms of discrimination, but accent discrimination is also a thing. Like, if you had three Oxford grads, like one from a private school, a Scouser and a Geordie, like, you just sort of, it's fucked. But, like, they could easily, I don't know, I think the Geordie and the Scouser would struggle purely because of the working class accent. Well, no, that's more of a regional thing. The class thing is you can get away with regional accents because nobody kind of knows what class you are.

1:03:50If you've got a Cockney accent, that's a class accent. Okay, with you.

1:03:56Is that your phone? I find that myself, but I'm very, it's a central class accent. When Kathy first came in to see me for an interview, and firstly I heard her accent, and I thought, ah, posh tar. It must be thick as a brick. Because posh accent for me straight away says thick as a brick. Yes. Like Jager Brice Mock or David Cameron or Boris Johnson or that. I'm like straight away, mate, you know. Yeah. You know they're thick because before they even – and I'm as biased as maybe they are. Who are some other really smart working class advertising marketing guys that you admire? Well, I don't – advertising guys.

1:04:47John started off as working class, John Eckertine. He changed his accent because it was much more pragmatic to do that. But John, sorry, John... John was born in Finchley, wasn't he? Huh? I think he was born in Finchley. North London. Yeah, I think he said that, yeah. He said that. That's exactly where it is. North London, yeah. It's interesting because he said he felt like an... He said to me he felt like an outsider because I think his mum was Irish. And his dad was a... His dad, I can't remember where his dad was from. Labourer, I think. Yeah, but he basically said I always felt like... I was going to say, I thought, oh, respect.

1:05:23Yeah. Yeah, he was saying he always felt outside looking in, but he said that gave him a great advantage when it becomes to creativity and having a different point of view. Well, that was the great advantage for me going to New York. Growing up in England, you're like a fish, you know, what's water to a fish? You don't know. You don't even know it's there, the whole class distinction or anything. You don't know it's there. Have you heard the David Foster Wallace speech? No. So it's a great little analogy of culture, essentially, and it goes, it's the story of, it's his commencement speech. So he's a writer.

1:05:55He wrote Infinite Jest, really good books. And he goes, there's these two little fishies swimming along and this big fish swims past them. And the big fish goes to the little two fish, goes, how's the water, boys? And the two little fish go, what's water? And you don't know your own culture until you get taken out of it. Well, that's what I was just going to tell you. When I was 19, I went to New York. it was the first time I'd been taken out of the fish tank and looked back at England and realised there was a fish tank. Yes. And realised there was water there. So now after five years in New York, I come back and now I'm in the water and now I know it's water.

1:06:34And now I can know it's not – now I can be objective about what's right and what's wrong. And there's – the best for me is partially English and partially American. If you're English, totally English, then you're subservient and scared stiff and a lot of self-control and a lot of good manners and politeness, but when it goes too far, you're subservient and scared stiff. In America, you're confident and you work things out for yourself, but the downside, when it goes too far, you become arrogant and a bragger and loud and that. So what do you want? Put the two things together. you want the self-control of the English, the British, but you want the confidence that you get from the Americans.

1:07:23So the guy from Minor Figures, he lives in Nashville. So I went to Nashville to do the podcast with him. And I was talking to him about this stuff. So we're driving along the motorway and they've got this big lawyer who's got a fake tan on his sort of bald head. And it just says, like, you know, Charlie Ryan, don't sell without the intel. well whereas and then we were saying and it's kind of braggadocious right but like but then what will was saying to me goes but mate when you're back to looking at your fish tank when you when you suddenly look back at the uk he's like we've got a thing to adding these little very polite little things like on the tube see it say it sort it or or sort it or every little helps you know with tesco and it's just when you compare the two i find it fascinating it's so interesting you need i mean for me you put them both together which is the english go around the houses to say anything and the brits are now the americans are like here's what i want now it doesn't surprise me i could be like the american i want this but it didn't kill you to put please on the end just one syllable you know well thank you so you could you have to go around the houses like the brits the the brits are more like the japanese i was talking to japanese people why they send their children to school in england not america and they say that's because the english are more like us how are we more like the japanese we don't go quite as far as the japanese but everything is over the top polite and mustn't hurt your feelings and worry about what i'm saying is saying the way that you won't get hurt your feelings hurt you won't blah blah blah whereas americans is here's the information like a lumber here it is you know now you put the two things together and i'd like here's the information are you okay with that the the you can put yes it's you're taking the two things and yeah i don't what so when you went to art school in america i think you i read that you did was it this prime priming cycle psychology class oh i did psychology class yeah yeah what talk to me about uh why that was useful to you what did you learn from that well it was um it It was behavioral psychology, not clinical psychology.

1:09:40So it was mass thinking. It was learning how people think and how the mind works and things nobody ever questions before. And it leads you into being able to step outside your mind and observe your mind, which most people don't do, which has been very useful with Western philosophy and Eastern philosophy, being access to those. Because unless you can step outside your mind and observe your mind, you can't do anything like that. You think you are your mind. You think, you know, you don't have any access to any self-control. You constantly just react. Yeah? And that means you're a passenger in a car with no steering wheel.

1:10:28And the Buddha said, act, don't react. What do you mean by that? Don't react. If, you know, if normally if I say something that you don't like without even thinking, you react. Now, what you'd have is if I say something, you'd be separated off from your mind. So you think, well, hang on, my mind doesn't like that. Now, is my mind right not to like that or have I misinterpreted it? What is it? Is that does that link in the book? I think there's a thing where you say don't you don't see what you don't see. You see what you see. Is that right? I've got that right? Yeah, you don't see what's there.

1:11:12You see what you see. Well, but that's what's that point? That's really interesting. Epistemology, that's the, if you get into... What does epistemology mean? Well, Washington philosophy. You know, you could go right back to, Democritus said, all there is in the universe is atoms and void, everything else is mere opinion. Say that, all there is in the universe is atoms and void, everything else is mere opinion. What does that mean? I understand what it means, but what's... It means, what I've got there is a mass of atoms. there isn't an object that is Dan. There's a mass of atoms, which my mind interprets that mass of atoms as Dan.

1:11:52Now, an ant won't interpret that as Dan. An ant will interpret it as a mountain. An elephant will interpret it as a little mouse. The Dan is a level of interpretation in just a mass of stuff. Yes. Once you know that, you know your mind is determining your reality. the when i did the toshiba thing i left and started another agency and i was waiting for the toshiba client to call me and give me his account and he didn't didn't even call me and i thought nah he's staying there he's staying where he is that's that's that so yeah so so uh i thought he's not interested so i was talking to a mate of mine Mike and I was telling, I said you know, the Toshiba client just hasn't called and Mike said, and what did you make that mean?

1:12:51That was really powerful. What had actually happened was the Toshiba client hadn't called. I had made that mean rejection. I do that all the time. Yes. What then happened was I thought, I wonder if I'm right. All I know for a fact is what's happened is he hasn't called. Let's see. So I called him up and I said, how are you doing? And he said, I wonder when you were going to call. Do you want this account or not? The client said to me. Yeah. He said, because we did some advertising and I'm wondering if you're going to call. I had made it that he'd rejected us because that was my took. The reality was he hadn't called.

1:13:27My reality made by my brain was he's rejected us.

1:13:33For that, from like a creative. That's what he means by an act of react. Yes. no that's a good lesson for me because i i'll i go into cash catastrophize modes where i think everything's going pete tong and i'm fucked and actually it's like step back and just you just look at what actually happened yeah rather than what you made out of what with with that sort of uh principle of we all think well we we don't see what's there we see what we see or something whatever the thing is loads of people in the uk i don't know how many people in the UK, if we're all walking around with different stories in our head, different views of the world, different values, different upbringings, understanding that and then you're trying to create advertising that cuts through, how do you do that when we all have our own different shit going on in our own head?

1:14:22That's the great thing about form follows function. My first job is to wipe a slate clean. And that's function wipes the slate clean. If I'm doing brand, then I'm fucking about jumping straight in with, what do they want? What are they thinking? How can I do that? If I'm doing function, I've wiped the slate clean. Yes. What are we doing here? Never mind what everybody else is thinking for the minute. What's our job? What's the fun? And now, how can advertising address that? Now, have I got money for paid for advertising? Or is there owned advertising that I'm not currently using? uniforms window shop windows, trucks sides, whatever and also if not is there earned advertising that becomes part of the function can I create earned advertising but it all comes back to function if form follows, that's why that was critical and that's actually your start point of wiping the blank wiping all the shit off the blackboard before we get back to start with now what are we doing rather than just adding more shit to the blackboard brain the brain do just just it's what's in what's there's a story i think is it uh that woman who wants to have more sex she's like 67 and asks for blokes who read a lot or something that's a really good story yeah roundheeled woman was her book i can't remember her name but the book was called a roundheeled woman around healed woman yeah well detail that story because i think it's really interesting and what are some of the principles from that like so you know the there's the store i think it's she she basically put out media in an ad she wanted she was 67 and she wanted to have more sex i think is what well she was worried that if she didn't do something she'd now go the rest of her life with no more sex yeah yeah that was it but she didn't want to just shag anyone yeah so she put an advert in a in a news newspaper i think and it said i'm looking for geezers who read a lot i think well yeah i'm looking for someone who read a lot and she said trollop works for me now in english you'd misinterpret that because trollop means something else over here she means the writer trollop right being american she they don't think they have that word trollop yeah she just means the writer trollop and and the power of that was that she attracted the right people in well i mean generally yeah you'd uh uh you you attract as many people as possible the the more interesting one for me was the woman who went on the dating site and she was a data scientist or something i think that she put herself on the dating site and she attracted all these blokes she didn't want they're just hookups just like one night stand and they weren't very good looking blokes and she thought i'm doing this wrong she thought at the start point if you go back to steve jobes your start point shouldn't be what you've got it should be what your audience wants yeah so steve jobes never started off with uh i can make a thing i can make this thing that's got 60 megabytes of memory and five megahertz of production and all of that he made it with and he said it's like a thousand songs in your pocket yeah so not what of the thrill of what i've made is what you want and so what did she do on the dating apps right so first thing she did she thought well um let's have a look at the kind of guys i want let me research the kind of women they're looking for and she went on and she went looked at the guy she won and clicked on the kind of women they were looking at and looked at what they were putting up and unlike what she just put up was a straight picture of herself and then six or eight pages of what she liked doing she learned what the women were were they put up really attractive pictures of themselves and they put up very short bios of very interesting things they did like that so she redid her thing with very attractive pictures of herself and a much shorter bio that would be more attractive to the target market she wanted.

1:18:48And I think she got 60 responses, five of them she went on dates with them, one of them she married and she's got two kids in them. And by turning it around of instead of here's what I've got to broadcast, let's go and listen to what the audience wants. You know? Such a good story. And then the woman in the paper with the 67-year-old was her genius by saying she wants readers. She's basically alienating – or not alienating, she's basically cutting off everyone she's not interested in. Well, I think she's very clear about what being about sex for a start. So she wasn't worried about being quite open about that.

1:19:31It's quite unusual in the paper. And she's also So she really was Just looking for hookups And if you want to talk She'll talk about This, that and the other But hers was a much more open thing

1:19:52There's There's this philosopher that you mentioned Which is the freedom to And the freedom from I think that was Is it Isla something think is yeah that was it berlin yeah yeah yeah what's that about well i mean that's that's that's that's great i think that's america could do with a huge dose of live that at the moment they just say freedom and for them freedom just means freedom to do whatever the fuck i want but there's two kinds of freedom there's freedom to there's there's negative freedom and positive freedom. And positive freedom is the freedom to do. And negative freedom is the freedom from.

1:20:35So positive freedom might be the freedom to go in a restaurant and eat whatever I want, whenever I want. Negative freedom, on the other hand, would be the freedom from hunger, the freedom from getting fat, the freedom from whatever I'm frightened of. So if you take it with Americans, the positive freedom is the freedom to have guns, carry guns and go around using whenever I want. But what that does is that removes people's negative freedoms, which is the freedom from fear and the freedom from getting shot. What it actually is, the interesting thing that Berlin had to say, was it's a sliding scale.

1:21:12The more you have of one, the less you have of another. So the more positive freedom you have for everybody to have guns, the less negative freedom you've got of freedom from people from fear of getting shot or vice versa the more freedom the more negative freedom from people from getting shot the less freedom people can have to go and have all the guns they want so the positive freedoms and negative freedoms any other examples of that like anything you want freedom to speed down the street versus freedom get run over. Freedom is a slide in scale. That's what they don't realize, certainly in America, that freedom is a slide in scale.

1:21:54If you have more of one, you've got less than the other, and you have to decide which you want. That'll also be when you're positioning, and the most important thing if you're launching anything or advertising is always positioning what are you positioning it against and you look at it is that what position yeah what would you define positioning as well positioning is what are you position same as it is in football what are you positioning it against so uh has my product got more of this is everybody else in the market got more of this in which case maybe there's a niche for a product that's got less of this yeah the the um i always look at it like a like a fishing pond and everybody's fishing where all the fish are but what that i mean and that's good there's loads of fish there but the problem is everybody's fishing there there might be a chunk over here where there's a lot less fish but there's also nobody fishing so there's less fish here but i've got a lot of myself and i don't have to share them with anybody else that's niche marketing and i'm a big fan of niche marketing you sort out uh instead of chasing the mass like everybody else in which you become the littlest fish in a big pond you you choose the part that everybody else isn't looking at and but you've got it to yourself so you become the biggest fish in a smaller pond and uh that's the strategic skill you need to separate strategy from tactics and strategy is a much bigger issue of where am I going to do this?

1:23:35And when you do that, you reposition everybody else. So like you would say Avis when Bill Birnbach, after he did Volkswagen, and Volkswagen, don't forget, he positioned it as a small, cheap, reliable car. And when he did that, it repositioned everybody else as stupid for buying these big, fat, expensive cars. if you position yourself correct you reposition the competition when he did avis he did which is really interesting he he he found out that avis was the second biggest in the market so he repositioned it as why go with us we're only number two well because we're number two we have to try harder yes to reposition hers as the fat cat who doesn't really need your business and doesn't care Yeah.

1:24:25Yeah. The Pepsi, you look at the same thing. You will look at it whenever number two gets it right. They reposition number one. So say the strategy and the positioning is finding a part of the pond where there's still some fish, but not many people are fishing there, right? And say you start catching loads of those fish, but then those fish began, there's not many fish there, and you actually want to go and start eating up some of the other side of the pond. i.e. you start in a niche category with a niche product but eventually and Seth Godin do you know Seth Godin the marketeer yeah he's been on the podcast three times and he basically says your strategy and tactics say that's the adoption curve yeah you start niche small part of the swimming of the not swimming pool uh fishing pond whatever but eventually you're going to hit the the totalable address or market you're going to kind of hit that and if you want to go bigger you're going to have to change, i.e.

1:25:23open up to more of that pond. How do you think about that? Well, then you're in a much better position to do that, aren't you? You grow yourself and get yourself in a powerful position by eating the small pond as much as you can until you own that. And the good news then is we're too big for the small pond now. We have to grow. How do you do that without – so how do you change the way you talk about things as a brand or as a business, if that's a better way of putting it, to get more fish space, sorry, pond space. Yeah. Well, look at Volkswagen. They started off as a little imported car in America, and I think either they're now the second biggest in the world next to maybe Toyota.

1:26:08I mean, there isn't a rule for how you do it. Again, now you change problems. Now it's a different problem, and now we have to do it differently. Great for Steve Jobs, if you've read Steve the Isaacson book. I haven't read that. It's been – everyone tells me he's read it. Absolutely great. Steve Jobs, you look at – you solve a different problem, a new problem in a different way. You look at the iPod. When Steve Jobs had launched the iPod and he got it out there, and it was a lot of penetration of the iPod, and everybody had got an iPod, and that was really good. but how does he grow it even further?

1:26:49And the thing was, everybody had it in their pocket, so you couldn't tell. The opinion formers had it in their pocket, but that wasn't really an adverb for it. People walking around with it in their pocket, no one could see it, and all the people that didn't have it didn't know that opinion formers had it. So what does Steve Jobs do? It's a different problem now, and this is what I love. What did he do? I thought this was absolutely brilliant. All audio devices obviously have headphones, right? And all headphones had brown leads. They're all identical. And what Steve Jobs did is he did something nobody else ever thought of.

1:27:29He changed his to white leads. So you didn't now have to see the iPod to know that this person with the white leads has got an iPod in their pocket. So you would see all the opinion formers have now got white leads. It's interesting. So Rory talks about, Rory Sutherland talks about the same thing with why Guinness has had this huge growth versus, say, cider. Because when you're in a boozer, a bit like the white Apple AirPods, if you see a lot of people drinking the black and white liquid, there's a mimetic thing. A lot of these people are drinking it. You know, that good-looking crowd, the aspirational good-looking crowd are drinking it.

1:28:07Or these celebrities are drinking at a pub. It's like, bang. With cider, you can't tell whether it's fucking beer, whether it's whatever it is, and it's much harder to have that Apple, Steve Jobs' Apple headphones effect. No, sure, sure. That's so interesting. Of course. So it's like making it obvious for the early adopters, sorry, for the early adopters to show the, I don't know what the next one is, not the loud guys, whatever the fuck it is, that they're using this. That's so interesting. Well, the best of all of those was they used to call it ambush marketing. And it's kind of a couple of Olympics back.

1:28:47Who made those? Beats. Beats, was it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they gave them out free to all the Olympics competitors. So the Olympics competitors, and these were Wi-Fi, so you didn't have a lead rhythm, and they'd wear them on their heads, walking out, and they persuaded them, You don't want to be listening to the crowd. You want to put on your favorite music, and you can have it right up until the minute when you start, either swimming or running or whatever it is. So you'd see all of the competitors in the Olympics putting Beats headphones on as they walked out up to the swimming. But all the best in the world were in Beats headphones right up and just taking them off at the last minute before they started.

1:29:30Now, it hasn't cost you anything but a free pair of headphones for each of those guys, and you've got the best in the world wearing them. Because the guy who founded Beats was Jimmy Iovine and he worked with Steve Jobs. So he founded that with, yeah, he's a really interesting bloke to listen to. But his, yeah, so Jimmy Iovine, he worked. So it's interesting that you've pulled that link because they worked together. So then on the freedom from freedom to thing, we'll jump around. How does that affect how you think about advertising or making decisions around that, if that's a humanism? Well, all of it, it depends.

1:30:11You'll use it according to what your problem is in a particular case. And you learn all of these things because it just gives you so much more options. I heard an expression today that I liked a lot, which is you can only eat what's in the fridge. you know so when you when you're looking to crack a problem and you open the fridge your mind uh if there's not much in there that's that's what you got you you put a lot in your mind as much as you possibly you have an inquisitive mind you have as much curiosity as possible the more you've got the more options you've got you know you're just like opening a fridge with much more stuffy to choose from i'm reading the uh there's a really good book called john and Paul all about the Beatles and their relationship.

1:31:05And it's really interesting because I've read a lot of books about the Beatles. They're my favorite band. But this one really goes into depth into their relationship and how they were different. And John lived out in Surrey in Weybridge. And he was just getting off his cooked on fucking LSD. He was getting off his swede. And was being very deeply introspective. and yeah, just introspective. But Paul was living in London and he was going out and he was basically just being a, I think in the book, they say he was like a jet fighter, guzzling curiosity, right? And he was just fucking wanting to, it was in just reading all these books.

1:31:44He was reading Aldous Huxley, Brave New World. He was hanging out with him. He'd go to this library, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And they'd just get, he'd get, come, drive down the A3 with all this fucking input, like a fridge full of stuff. then he'd meet John who was being this kind of because John was more morbid and um you know he had a really dark relationship with his mom and his auntie died sorry the mom died and his auntie was strict and they but these two forces came together and it collided yeah but then there's a story in the book where they go up and they go into this library this bookshop obviously now it's much easier to get books and they're looking at this I think it was this one one book and in the opening line of the book it was like turn off your mind relax and float downstream and it's this line in the book john wrote a note of it and then obviously that's the uh is it tomorrow never comes or something that song yeah it's like turn off your mind relax and floats and it's and he wanted to create this song that felt like an acid drip but it was all because they had a full fridge and i just felt it's so interesting you're saying that you're so mad well i mean it's true See, that's the great thing about art school is I find at university, mainly who you meet, but university is kind of vertical thinking.

1:32:59Like university, everybody's looking for the right answer. Art school, nobody's interested in the right answer. Everybody's interested in an interesting answer. So, you know, right is like Picasso said, you know, computers can give you the right answer. So that's, you know, what you learn at art school isn't mainly from what the teachers teach you. It's from the other people there and all the strange things all the other people are into there and things that are all over the place because they're not the right answer. Everybody's got different answers. And that's the exciting, fascinating, amazing thing about the curiosity of art school.

1:33:43you come up with so many everybody's desperately looking because nobody wants to choose the same old answers as everybody else, everybody wants a new and different answer you're filling up your mind with all of these things from everywhere whereas at uni it's much more like oh wait a double thing because there you know you shouldn't whereas at our school it's exactly the opposite yeah, you're not supposed to read those so that's why I'm reading that it's I've got a thing which I write about a lot, which is the smart answer hides in the dumb question. And to your point with all this clever fucking bullshit language, people are too scared to ask the dumb question.

1:34:22And I think that's where you find some really interesting answers. It's actually a better set of questions. And I was reading this this morning, so it's like why it's in my mind. But John Lennon went to George Martin, because they were at Abbey Road. That's not far from here, is it? And he goes, I want this song to sound like an orange. and then you listen to Tomorrow Never Comes or it wasn't that song but some of the songs on that album and it's just like yeah that sounds like a fucking orange but you've got to ask that really inane question to begin with Is that Ringo on that? On which one? Tomorrow Never Knows Tomorrow Never Knows is when they like it's really weird when it goes like and they're like I mean the drums I do think the drums are great on Tomorrow Oh yeah yeah yeah but that is yeah it would be Ringo on that one yeah because that was part He's such a bad rapper, Ngo, and I always think if that was him on Tomorrow Never Knows, that makes up for everything.

1:35:16Yeah, well, because that's the one that was part of the Revolver album, I think. Yeah, it was the Revolver album. But, yeah, he was in the band then. And they were just also just looking at problems. They were tweaking everything. It's just like it feels like you can listen to that and you can feel like you're on an acid trip. I've never done acid, but, like, it's fucking sick. I want to talk about there's a thing in the book where you talk about Oliver Croft. The, the, the, I'm not a musician or I don't know much about musician, but the album that blew my generation apart was the one after that.

1:35:49Well, the White Album? No, no. The Sergeant Pepper. Oh, yes. Do you know how I came up with the name for that? Yeah. What, on the airplane? Oh, because, oh, because of Dr. Pepper. No, so I read this, again, this could be bullshit, but like I read that he was on a, again, the idea of creativity is all around you. is he was trying to think of a name and he asked, he was ordering his food in first class and someone's brought the salt and the pepper and he writes Sergeant Pepper. That's what I've read in quite a few places. Yeah, yeah. But the principle of that is creativity is all around you. The thing I know, the first time it was amazing, that's why it'd be my favourite piece of art.

1:36:26If I was picking one piece of art, it would be Pete and Blake's cover because we used to see, I was a foundation tech at East Ham Tech at the time and we used to sit around and go through the cover and try and name everybody who was on there. And if you look at that, talk about a full fridge. You try and name everybody who's on the cover. Now, inside, I think they tell you. That's on the Sgt. Pepper album, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Peter Blake. Is that who did it? Did you know the Rolling Stones came out with another similar one? That album. The Satanic Majesties? No, the album cover looks so fucking similar to Sgt.

1:37:04Pepper's. Did they? Yeah, there's a thing in a book about it of I'll find it afterwards. I don't know which album. I like the Rolling Stones' main five songs, but the Beatles I like, obsessed with the whole. But just get that, if you're a big and 120th century icon, I mean, that's my great piece. That cover, we used to sit around and look at it for ages and ages and ages and just go through naming every one of it. Now, that's a full fridge. Have a look at it for yourself and try and name all the characters. And there's Max Miller, there's Nietzsche, there's Swami somebody or other, there's Ayn Rand, there's really, really all over the place.

1:37:51You talk about a full fridge.

1:37:56You just look at that and you fill it up, and that's like art school for filling up your mind for all that many different influences, You know, from Tom Mix through to Bertrand Russell. Because I think Bertrand Russell was 90 and Paul was hanging out with him at that point. I think it's in this book. It's really interesting. Because is it Bertrand Russell? He's got a quote which is in your book, which is the smart, dumb people or foolish people or something. The problem in the world is the smart people are full of all the answers for everything while the intelligent people are full of doubt. Yes.

1:38:40Did you ever have really bad self-doubt with your work? Of course, yeah, of course, 100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you've done something great is usually when you're not always but often when you're scared stiff of it because you've gone past the boundary of safety. you've gone past Helmut Krohn it's right, I'll go right now Helmut Krohn Helmut, his name is Helmut Helmut Krohn He's the guy who did Volkswagen and did Avis for my generation he's like the best holder and he said if you can look at something and say I like it, then it isn't new because it's the comfort being reassured what's the most scary thing you put out when you had real bad doubt with it oh i love tosh got a toshiba that's so good the the next day i went into a recording and uh i was for something else and i was sitting in the recording waiting to get started and he had talked to the engineer and the engineer said go on there's some on tv in there you see it this last night and i said um yeah what'd you say and he said oh two shoot things there was an ad for sony in an advert to shiba and i thought fucking great because i know the week before he would have said an advert sony and for some other telly given what our problem was and their awareness as i say in six weeks went from two percent to thirty percent and buried every bury everybody else and he was just saying and then for some sorry man you had to hold that up and that Fucking out of everything he remembered last night, he remembered Sony, which had 30%, so that they owned the market, and Toshiba, which had 2%.

1:40:31And we'd gotten them up to the, in one night, the awareness of Sony. And he thinks it's shit. I don't care if he thinks it's shit. He did the job. That's form follows function. My job was not to get you to do something you liked and you couldn't remember the name of it. the um the there's a story in there of like oliver cromwell's beheading uh and i can't remember the lesson but yeah if you could detail that that would be interesting so what was oliver cromwell again so i asked some really dumb two-year-old questions say what yeah because yeah who was he cromwell yeah i don't know like i probably should know that but i don't well it's the interesting thing is I saw this quote yesterday that said the British exported all their religious zealots to America and all their criminals to Australia and the Aussies got the better deal.

1:41:29And Cromwell was one of the religious zealots that you know all the Puritans. Yeah. So the Puritans, after the Civil War in England, and the Civil War was against the Catholics versus the, at that point, the Protestants were the Puritans. And they were crazy Puritans. They were like, no singing, no dancing, no bright-colored clothes. You know the Amish in America? everything back to back to Lone Cromwell was like that what year was that? 1660 1660 1660 to 71 somewhere in there 11 years he was the dictator of Britain really? yeah we didn't have a king he cut the head off the king he beheaded the king how did he manage that?

1:42:22obviously not literally with a fucking sword in the civil war that was a civil war cavaliers and roundheads yeah so I'm asking questions because I want to fill my gaps of curiosity yeah yeah I don't I probably should. I actually remember some, like, it shows how unaspiring my history teacher was at school. But, like, yeah, I remember sort of vaguely touching upon it, but I was probably just fucking picking my fingers with my pencil or something. The Cavaliers was supporters of the king, and he was a Catholic. And because of the Reformation, since Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, that Britain was supposed to be Protestant.

1:43:06And because this guy was taking him Catholic, Cromwell was on his way to America, but he was stopped to be here to take over the army to fight the Protestants against the Catholics. And ultimately, the Protestants... Why was he going to America? He said he was going to America. He was on his way. So why? Because all the Puritans were going to America because England was fucked. It was full of whoring and singing and boozing and everything like that, and they thought England was fucked. So they were going to America. This is in 1640 he was on his way there. But he was stopped to take control of the army here, new model army, the new model army.

1:43:50And I mean, it's really interesting because in those days, men just used to hordes of blokes just fighting each other. and he'd organized them into a proper fighting unit and even marching. And he'd taken guys from the farms who didn't even know the left from their right. So you would put a piece of wheat, because they're farmers, you put a piece of wheat in one shoe and a piece of straw in the other, and instead of saying left, right, left, right, you'd say wheat, foot, straw, foot, straw, foot. Clever. Simple language. Without even being able to know the left from the right, he turned them into an army.

1:44:29Anyway, beat the royalists, beheaded the king. And how did that fight, that argument, not argument, that war start? Because the king wanted to get rid of the Puritans and to take over the country, so he kept trying to get the French to send an army across. Right. Which, against parliament, which we had parliament used to meet, he wanted parliament to grant him tax and parliament wouldn't grant him tax because they wouldn't he wouldn't back down and give them the freedoms that they wanted right the king wouldn't stay in line so he wanted the french army to come across and help him fight against parliament which cromwell said was treason because you're fighting against parliament which is the will of the people so i became the people versus the king and they found the king guilty of treason so they cut his head off Now, what then happened was Cromwell reigned for 11 years, and it was absolutely miserable.

1:45:34No singing, no dancing, no nothing. So much so that when he died, his son had to leave, and they invited the king's son back and said to him, now if you behave yourself this time, you can be king, and we all want to go back to whoring, drinking, singing and booze and having a good time like we did, like ordinary people want to do

1:46:00because Cromwell tried to turn ordinary people into miserable sods who do nothing but go to church and pray all day. Well, your simple tarnished human truths is that's not what ordinary people want to do. They want to sing. They want to dance. They want to get drunk. They want to have fun. You know, bring that into advertising They don't want to be lectured They want to have fun So interesting The John Hegarty said that the best brand He got asked this question at a seminar in France Or maybe America And someone says Loads of the audience go, what? Everyone goes, what's the best brand of all time?

1:46:42And someone would say Coca-Cola or Pepsi And John said else the catholic church and he goes um they've got i mean they've got a great logo and the founders on the logo or like or maybe christianity or something the founders on the logo they have all the best real estate in the center of town and they're making people believe uh or buy something that's not even real which has got to be a belief and he says it's the best brand of all time and obviously it's a bit tongue-in-cheek but i think it's really fascinating I mean you know my feelings about brain it's like yeah it's so fascinating so I listen to this podcast there's this really good podcast called Trigonometry and they've got this British guy who studies a lot of he's literally just published a book about Rasputin and he talks all about Russia and he's a sir I don't know his name but listening to a podcast with him last night and he was saying uh or one of the things they were asking is they're trying to get into the russian mindset today right and he was saying well it's really important we go back in time sure to understand what happened obviously they got invaded by the mongolians understand racial memory racial memory yeah and then they had the whole thing with the tsar pre like world war one and then they had i think they had enough they had they've always been kind of this this paranoia around them um of when they got invaded by the mongolians i think they raped they were they were there for like 200 years and then um the the yeah the the the falling of the tsar uh they had a war with japan as well it's always been this fear based off what we were saying about Cromwell, what do you think, what did you say, it was racial memory.

1:48:38What do you think we've got in our bones from the long history we've got in this country? Brexit tells you that, doesn't it? On the island. You look at mainland Europe and they're all joined physically. And I mean, hey, go back to Shakespeare, this crown of kings, this demi-septadol, this other-eaten demi-paradise. This precious fortress set in a sea which serves as a moat for protection against the envy of lesser lands. You know, it's an island. People don't just wander. If it wasn't for the English Channel, we'd all be speaking German. Tanks can roll through France and Tolland and Belgium, but you can't roll through 20 miles of sea.

1:49:28Yeah? So what creates our personality, for better or for worse, is we love to be friends with Europe, but we like our own front door. You know, and we come in and welcome, but, you know, knock on the door first and we'll let you in. But it's... Yeah, it's interesting how that... And then also, I suppose in America, if you look at it today, ultimately it's a nation of opportunists, i.e. immigrants, who went there. They took that risk. Well, America's different. What I loved about America is it's a nation of rebels. Right. But rebels by... They rebelled against Britain. Yeah. So the whole myth is rebellion.

1:50:22Mm. And the whole national myth. and that's what I liked a lot. They love rebellion and I found that in art school.

1:50:35What they loved most of what I did was the more rebellious. They weren't looking for skill, they were looking for rebellion. Skill if you got it, that's great. But yeah, everybody's got skill. And if you look at American art after, look at art after, say, up until about 1950, capital of art was parish. after that it was new york and it wasn't because skill jackson pollock has no skill uh de kooning uh raushenberg uh none of those guys have any particular skill what they have is rebellion they have something new and unusual breaks out that's what i love uh duchamp that's what he who's duchamp i don't know much about art to be honest oh okay well the long the long the short is once you got the camera you pretty much reach the limits of skill yep where skill is going to take you now we need that was about now we need to be thinking about what else can art do so you can't be representing reality anymore because the camera can already do that better so what else can you do so you got picasso uh uh uh and duchamp were your two different routes Picasso was visual and Duchamp was cerebral.

1:51:54Duchamp would do mental art, any art. We went into all the different areas of the urinal, soda urinal, Also found objects, broken objects, sticking things that exist together.

1:52:22Conceptual art, all that side came from Duchamp, whereas Picasso came from looking at things other than reality. So before Picasso's side of it, reality had become an end point. With Picasso, reality became a start point. So he flipped it round. Well, you know, when you, what turned Picasso around was at the Armoury show in Paris about 1910, 19, somewhere around there. He looked at, he saw that what they do in the third world in some of these places, they take a feature, they simplify and they exaggerate. Simplify and exaggerate. And Picasso put that together with cubism, which he'd gotten from Cezanne.

1:53:18So you put cubism plus simplify and exaggerate, and that's that whole Picasso visual side versus the conceptual side, which wasn't to do with what things look like anymore. It was to do with what happens in your mind, which was Duchamp. Is that simplify and exaggerate like a principle in marketing as well? 100 %? How would you simplify and exaggerate? Well, someone comes to me with a really complicated brief. The first thing I've got to do is, I know I've got 30 seconds, so I've got to take this right down to what's the one simple thing I want the punter to take away. Mainly punters, we know 89 % of advertising, they don't take anything away.

1:54:08so if i've got one thing i want to take that away you know the the cliche that um cdp used to use is if i throw you nine tennis balls how many can you catch yeah none one probably if we're lucky i'm pretty uh mal-coordinated i'm joking yeah yeah you catch one yeah there's an eight to one chance it will be the one i wanted it to catch so if i've got one and afterwards it's too late to say you should have called the other one so what i should do beforehand is don't throw you nine tennis balls sort out the critical one and just throw you that that's so good right so good now that's point one yes simplify yeah now how do i get that simplified message how do i kill everything that's around me and make sure that simplified message is what you remember tomorrow it's got to be exaggerating you know how does the man who gets drives drives the snowplow get to the snowplow so what simplifies this will drive in snow how i exaggerate that is i'll talk about the snowplow yes you know so simplify and exaggerate Picasso, we're doing that in Apatom on the creative side.

1:55:30So would you say you're more of an artist or a writer? Because your writing is spectacular. But I'd love to know, where would you say you sit on that? I'm a failed art director. I'm no good as an art director. I want to be an art director, but I'm no good. Why were you no good? Paul Arden said it to me once. He's really, really good. Did he write that book? He wrote that small little book. What's it called? It's not How Good You Are. it's how good you want to be. Was he at Saatchi Saatchi? Yeah. Yeah. He's really good. The cleverest thing he did with that was he wrote on that the best-selling book in the world by Paul Arden.

1:56:03Yes. Now, of course it isn't, but he said, yeah, but it's the best-selling book by Paul Arden. Now when you're in an airport bookshop and you read the best-selling book in the world, nobody reads by Paul Arden. Well, I better have the best-selling book in the world. There must be something in it. Yeah. And it's quite a small book, isn't it? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, sorry. So Paul Arbin was at Saatchi Saatchi. The lesson about being in arts, you failed. He said to me, I was asking him why he's such a really good art director and I'm not. And he said, I see with my eye, you see with your mind. So he said, I see what is there.

1:56:42You see what you think is there or what should be there or what you can make out. And I realized it's exactly true. He sees with his eye. Great art directors see with their eye. and I see with my mind. What does it mean? What's there? What should be there? And that makes him a great art director and that's why I'm not a good art director because I see with my mind. Now, I don't see myself as a copywriter because I'm not a writer and I don't write. What it is is my attitude is get it in in the easiest, quickest possible. I don't write for Guardian readers or Times readers or Broadsheet readers.

1:57:21I just write for sun readers people who don't want to read much and let's make this life like in the pub what's the quickest shortest way to get this down that's so easy it's the best I think it's like the and it's such a delicious experience rereading your work in prep for this because it's just like they're just all these little they're almost like the sun reader advertising towels if that's the best way of putting it like they're just this like and you're just like fucking hell it's just so simple but also I think you've got the ability to do the Hemingway thing which is use one word i.e. simplify and exaggeration so like I don't know boy you still use one word find that one word which has the maximal impact to describe something and I think that's very that's why I love your writing see I think I think all the writing is editing yeah first you do a mind dump just don't even think about what you're writing Just get it all down.

1:58:20Then walk away, have a cup of tea. Then come back and now be a reader. Don't be a writer anymore. Now be a reader. That line can go. That line would be better up there. This line, we don't need that whole paragraph that can go. You know? Then now you're stripping it back. As a way of reminding you, you talk about Hemingway. Hemingway says where he learned to write was when he was a newspaper correspondent. and he wrote this really, wrote this long article about the thing he'd been sent to write about and the editor read it and said, right, rewrite it but put the facts at the front. And then we might say, well, I can put the facts at the front, that's the, I want to build to the facts at the front.

1:59:04And the editor said, well, let me put it this way. If we haven't got space on the page, we're going to start cutting everything and we'll start cutting from the back and if you've got facts at the fat back that's no good to us so put your facts at the front where they can't be cut and then we might say that's how he learned in that urgent style he's also got a quote i love which a lot of comedians have on their laptops which is the first draft of everything is shit and it's the whole point of like just get out your head yeah and then edit edit edit edit edit your writing is is in the edit strip it back until you can't possibly strip it back and then come back to it tomorrow and you're probably fine.

1:59:41You can still strip it back. When you have a thing in the shower and you're thinking, actually, you know, I like that paragraph, but I could cut that out. So crossover creativity is one of your books. What is crossover creativity as a definition? And then how can people start applying that to their lives? Yeah, well, I mean, you put two things together that don't go together and it creates a third thing.

2:00:12So what would you put together? I mean, who'd ever think, you know, before I went to America, I thought, I can't believe you'd eat peanut butter and jam. How can you possibly do that? Yeah. But you eat them and it's brilliant. You know, you create a whole third taste, which now you buy a jar of Skippy and it's already mixed up peanut butter and gin. You know? And you'll do that. You'll get John Webster was doing a commercial with a little baby for a mobile toy. I think it was Fisher Price, Fisher Price with a little baby. And it was okay. A little baby was playing with it and it was kind of cute.

2:00:55But what John Webster then did is he went and put Bob Hoskins' voice over the baby. Who's Bob Hoskin? A really rough, tough Cockney. Oh, really? So he's got a little baby. What's that here? What's that going from? What's this there? What's that? Oh, that's brilliant. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Suddenly, you've lifted it way out of thinking. So, you know, crossover creativity. Two things that shouldn't go together, creating a third thing that you hadn't seen. What other examples of that? Because this is so interesting. Oh, there's a million, wouldn't you? Where'd he go with these?

2:01:40Well, with our other Toshiko Toshiba, it's high tech, so we had a blueprint drawing, but if we had used the voice we were going to use originally on it, like that, it was quite alienating. So we thought we needed a blueprint, we needed a friendly voice, so we got Ianduri. Who's he? Ian Dury. He sounds like a bear. He's got reasons to be cheerful. Oh, you've got to listen to Ian Dury. Really? Oh, not many. Really? Ian Dury. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wait, what? So he sounds like a bear? He's got the deep voice. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah. He's got the deep voice. But it's great, brilliant lyrics. And I don't know if you'll like him, but he'd be.

2:02:29I'll tell you who's great examples of crossover is Kubrick. Stanley Kubrick. 100%. Yeah. He got the classic story John Webster used to tell me was when Kubrick had shot, he was shooting in 2001, and he had the second unit shooting the space station, revolving space station. And he said, okay, I want to come and watch the rushes of what the second unit shot, the space station. And they said, I don't want to watch a mute. Put some music on. And they said, well, we're just going to have like, you know, Howard Houston Control and all those kind of things on it, tinny voices. We haven't got those yet.

2:03:08And Kubrick said, well, I don't care. I'm not watching it mute. Put on what have you got. What have you got lying around? The only thing they could find lying around was the Blue Danube. So Kubrick said, I don't care. Put it there anyway. So they put it on. You've got the space station, the Blue Danube. And Kubrick turned the guy and said, you know, they're going to call me a fucking genius when I do this for real. Didn't they film, he filmed Platoon in East London, didn't he? Huh? No Platoon. Is Platoon his film? No, Full Metal Jacket. Full Metal Jacket. That was, yeah, sorry. That was recorded in East London.

2:03:41I used to, he wouldn't fly anywhere. I used to work where he shone that. Really? The, what you think of Hawaii as Becton Gasworks. Yeah, it's mad because it's a film about the Vietnam War, isn't it? Yeah, I used to work there. Really? See, he's got, at the end of that film, he's got a tank driving away, with that whole platoon of young marines behind it and they're singing the Mickey Mouse Club theme tune. Hmm. You know? That's crossover thinking again, opposite. So say someone's trying to develop this as a practice. Is it about walking down the street and noticing random shit and then melding them together or?

2:04:19Filling up the fridge. Yes. So you've got random things to put together. And you'll save things. You have to save things. John Webster, great John Webster, always had his office was like a shed full of things all over the wall that he was going to use one day, cartoons, photographs, bits of film. And he might put this together with that, you know, and you don't know, you know. I came in one day, he said, I said, what are you working on? He said, Courage Bitter. Courage Bitter? Courage. Courage Bitter, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I said, what's the brief? He said, they want to do a Hovis on it. I don't know if you remember.

2:05:04Hovis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dvorak. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Coming up the street in his bike. That's a shame. I said, because I had a good idea. What might be good for it? Chaz and Dave. Have you heard of Chaz and Dave? This old Cockney group. Yeah. They did this song called Gertrude, which I thought was really good. Because it sounded like Cockneys singing in a pub, but a bit punky. got punk interesting yeah johnson ah he had an old some old photographs of pubs in the 1880s in black and white and what they were like and he said look we could shoot it like this and and you know putting two things together that the the you know they pubs in the 1880s what's that got to do with what we're supposed to be doing and uh I think you'd always find that things that shouldn't go together, you know.

2:06:02It's not just... It's anything, isn't it? In the war, we wanted to make a bomber plane and our bombers, the bombers were so slow they were getting shot down a lot because they were slow enough the Germans could shoot them down. So the more they got shot down... Sorry, our planes are slow compared to the bombers yeah so the more why are they slow well because the more they start to get shot down the more guns they start putting on them right so the front guns and the back guns in the middle the americans the same thing and of course the more guns you put on them the slower they go so jeffrey de haverland said look uh here's a thought if instead of defending them what if we just made them so fast that the enemy couldn't catch them They said, how do you do that?

2:06:53And he said, well, we strip all the guns off. So they haven't got any guns at all, not a single gun. So now we've only got two men on them, and we haven't got any metal anymore anyway. We make them out of wood. So they made them, called the Mosquito, twin engine bombers, made out of wood with no guns on them so fast the German fighters couldn't catch them. I was thinking about things that you You know that don't go together What do you mean by that? How come as in like Taking the guns off sounds crazy Well not only does that sound crazy But the planes made By people that make Parker Knoll The people that make furniture Bending wood for furniture And now making bombers Because they're making out of wood There's a story in one of the books about The German U-boats trying to bomb us on one of the ships we had.

2:07:51I can't remember it, but it's like, I think the whole thing's about attacking, not defending. I don't know if you... Oh, well, there's a guy called Johnny. His name was Captain Walker, and they called him Johnny Walker after the... Yeah, was that World War II? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, detail that story because it's super interesting. Well, it's just great thinking was the convoys, Convoys, we totally depended on convoys coming across from America. Without them, we starve. Convoys as in like big boats full of shit. Yeah. You put 34 gear those together and bring them across from America full of enough food to keep us going.

2:08:29Because we were going to die out of starvation. Or not yet. Because we can't feed ourselves. This little island can't feed 50 million people. Yeah. 20 million tops. Yeah. So the Germans know this. So they send the U-boats out. They start sink them. So we send destroyers out to protect the convoys. Of course, three or four destroyers can't protect 40 or 50 ships in the convoys, so we're losing them. So the great opposite thinking is this guy, Johnny Walker, who's a captain and the destroyers said, we've been thinking about it wrongly. We've been thinking about the convoys are the prey for the U-boats.

2:09:07What about if we think about the convoys are the bait for the U-boats? so we pull all the ships off and we work out when the u-boats are going to attack the convoys and we sink the u-boats and we know the u-boats will be waited before the convoys get there so what we do is they sure enough when they'd find them on the surface and he'd sink the u-boats on the surface by flipping the whole thing yeah turning the convoys from prey into bait so good yeah what's the analogous thing in advertising then with that would you say flipping the bait into prey well flipping the prey into bait sorry flipping the prey into bait yeah um no you'd have to give me a bit longer to think about that there are a lot of these i've got so much in my head i need to sort out which one to wear No, it's all good.

2:10:01The other story you talk about is the village and the elephant and people, and I think it's the thing which is where a truth is both right and wrong. Oh, Jane. Yeah, talk about that. That's really good. Well, that's just the Jane story about nothing's absolutely right. It's everybody's different truth. And they use the instance of a guy who sees an elephant talking to five blind beggars on the street. He's just seen an elephant go through their town. He's in India. And he says to them, well, no, the beggars have just been saying an elephant's just been through our town. And the guy wasn't there, so he says to them, what is an elephant then?

2:10:50And one of the beggars who held the tail says, it's like a snake. And the other beggar who felt the foot says, no, it's like a tree trunk. And another beggar who tapped it on the side says, no, it's like a wall. And another beggar who did the trunk said, no, it's like a great big hose pipe. Now, they were all right, but they were also not right. So when you're locked into any discussion about your brief and what you should be doing, you need to keep an open mind about, is this just a little bit or is it the whole thing? Is there a bigger discussion to be had? You can be right and also be wrong.

2:11:33Rory Sutherland says, which is a great line, that the opposite of a great truth is often another great truth. When you have a war, it's never the right versus wrong. It's always right versus right. Yeah, I love that. I think it's the, Avivov is, it actually became a thing, but he had an idea of the opposite of Starbucks is a coffee shop that you'd put in train stations called Flat White or Fuck Off, which I think is genius. And actually it did manifest into this thing. They created it. But I think it's, yeah, what would you say are some universal truths that are both right and wrong? These are big questions.

2:12:12Sorry, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, pretty much once you study anything to do with the planet or philosophy, you know there isn't a right. The whole concept of right, the whole concept of reality, there isn't actually. We've got five senses which we think are ways to access reality. And we think outside these five senses, there's an ultimate reality that is the truth. Now, if you study any of the philosophers, I particularly like a guy called Barclay. Barclay says Eka es percupine which is to be is to be perceived that is where's Barclay from? England well Irish I think but yeah that actually sounds pretty English yeah I'm thinking of Ross Barclay the footballer yeah sorry is to be is to be perceived which is all we can ever know is what we perceive and can talks about phenomena and nomina and phenomena being what we perceive and nomina being what we can't perceive but we assume is there so we assume there's a reality but we'll never know because we can't perceive outside what we can perceive so um it's it's uh i don't know how much use that is to us other than knowing um you have to stay fluid and agile mind i think i think it's really good to study um um ed edward de bono edward yeah because there's a quote from him in the book.

2:13:58Well, he's the guy who invented lateral thinking or who gave the name to lateral thinking. Right. Which is everybody else. What's his background? Edward Zabono. Where's he from? Malta. Oh, jokes. He's very, very English, but he's… Yeah. Is Zabono's Maltese? I'm guessing he is. Yeah. I'm amazed he hasn't been knighted because he's much, much… If he was American, he'd be lauded to the hill. But being English, you'd rather Mike Elton John or Rod Stewart at night, something dozy like that, but rather than this great thinker that's influenced the entire planet, Edward de Bonon. We once got him into the agency to do a day at the agency, and in the morning we had him talk to our clients, that in the afternoon we had to do the same talk but to our staff so that we'd all be playing, we'd all be on the same page.

2:15:01That's so smart, yeah.

2:15:06Because if we're going to be, if we want to do lateral thinking, we need to A, educate our clients as to what that is, and B, make sure our clients have been educated the same way, make sure our staff have been educated the same way our clients have as to what lateral thinking is, then we'll all be on the same page. Otherwise, if we're trying to do it without educating our clients to it, it's like selling people something they don't want and they don't understand. What are the lessons from Edward de Bono's lateral thinking? And what actually, yeah, what does lateral thinking mean? well um everybody else as i say one of his quotes that i love is you don't dig a diff you don't dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper you don't hang on a thing on that hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper how does that apply well the flaw with most of our thinking is we just carry on digging and digging and digging in the same place.

2:16:12And we never back up, stop, leave that, and let's go and dig a different loll.

2:16:20What I learned from De Bono, and it was really, really useful for our agency, was the concept of Poe. Poe as in? Poe as in short for possible. Why is it quite shortened? Right. He says the problem with Western thinking is you've only got two responses to anything you offer. You've only got two responses to it, either yes or no. So if you offer a client a solution or if we're working our way towards a solution and I come up with something, I say, how about this? You've only got two responses, which is yes or no. So our thinking is very stilted. What he says, to free up the thinking, we need a third response, which is Po, which means let's see where it goes.

2:17:21So ideally what you should start with is you think of thinking as a provocation, not as a judgment, but as a provocation. So aware that will take you. That's so good. And at the end of all of that provocation, you then have a wash up and decide which of that was worth keeping. So he uses a, for instance, of if we say, and this won't sound right, but just go with it for a bit. He'll say, and you've got to be provocative with your first position. If you're designing the car, he'll say, okay, Poe cars had square wheels. Now, your initial reaction is, nah, stupid. Think of something else. but if you have Poe which is well possible let's talk about that what could be good about that square wheels well good is you wouldn't need a handbrake because it wouldn't roll away good is it wouldn't travel much so you wouldn't wear out your tyres good is it wouldn't be stolen good is

2:18:31it wouldn't be bumpy because it wouldn't travel Now, bad is you couldn't travel and a car is supposed to travel. Bad is if you ever did travel, it would be incredibly bumpy. Bad is it would ruin the road. Now, just on a simple thing like that over 30 seconds, we've got a list of things we don't want and things we do want from a car. We want it to travel. We want it to be comfortable. We want it to not use much rubber. We don't want it to roll away downhill. Now, this is a stupid thing, but just to show you how to flesh out different things you find. now when he did that as a poe what came out of that that they used was independent suspension as a way of making the car able to travel on square wheels but without the people inside finding it that the people inside feeling it you're not actually really suggesting seriously that a car should travel on square wheels you're using it as a provocation to get you out of thinking in a rap i love how you've said provocation not judgment yeah but we we have it with this i think there's another thing in the book if the farmer who asks for the power and gets told to fuck off but it's like if you don't if you don't try something you you're automatically getting rejection and i think we're even applying this to myself like we're gonna we're trying potentially well we are going to try i'm doing one tomorrow like new styles of content and i've been the judgment in my head which is probably i'm i'm telling judgment probably is doubt it's like oh no that won't work that won't work and it's automatically shut that door on that or if i applied sort of the poe of like what could we do with this how how how could we removing that judgment my head to more of a provocation like how could we do this differently what is good about this and we're going to try it tomorrow and it may fucking bomb or it may do well but as you say we can do the wash up on it and see and i think so many of us have these so many great things don't start because we have this pre this judgment in our head or if we just reframe that to a poe or provocation or a yeah it's just a just a new way of seeing things you think of it also you think with a bit of string we don't know where it's going to lead yet but let's just follow the bit of string and see where it goes and it might go somewhere we hadn't even thought about It should be great It will get us The main point of it Is to get us out of the rut You don't have to use that thinking If what you're doing at the moment is great Carry on with that But if you need to get out of the rut If you need to open up your thinking I want to ask about So just detail your career So you went to art school in New York And then my brain's escaped my research escaped me but then what did you what was the path after that that like when you were sort of as soon as you left art school okay so the interesting thing was uh i've always taken the path of least resistance so so uh i went up and down madison avenue trying to get jobs in art director and they all said to me no your art direction's no good but your ideas are very good why don't you why don't you be a copywriter and i thought well i don't want to be a copywriter But on the other hand, anybody can write, can't they?

2:21:49If you can write a letter, you can write. And if I've got ideas, I can do that, and then I can work with an art director who will make me look good. So I'll do that. So I did that, but the problem was in New York, although I can write the language, culturally I've got nothing in common with those people. I know nothing about baseball or American football or their history. I don't know Captain Kangaroo or Buffalo Bill or Howdy Doody or Joe Namath or any of these things. And I couldn't use anything I knew. They don't know the 66 World Cup squad or Dennis the Menace or Biffo the Bear or the Danny or the Beano or any of the things I know.

2:22:32So I was really stuck. Other than the language, I had nothing I could use. So I thought, but if I come back to England, I can, everything I've learned from these guys about rebelliousness and working class, I can take that back and I can use that in my working class with everybody I know and everything I know up there. And I can be as rebellious as that. So I brought that back. Obviously, I don't know anything about English advertising. I don't know anybody in advertising. So I go and live with mum and dad for a bit. How old are you at this point? 21 or two. Yep. I go and live with mum and dad while I'm trying to get a job.

2:23:09And of course, I can't, you know, I'm working class. Boy, you've got money. You need money. It's not middle class where your parents support you. Working class, boy, you need money. Got to bring money into the house. So one of my mates is a messenger, a merchant bank in the city. So he gets me a job there, 20 quid a week or whatever it was. And now I'm thinking, well, why do this? And you always look for what's around. What can you use? So never mind what everybody's told you. Everybody's told, you know, the conventional way to get a job in advertising is you get your portfolio together and you make an interview and you go for an interview, put on a suit and tie.

2:23:47Next week you make another job, you go for that interview, put on a suit and tie, blah, blah, blah, blah, carry on like this. And you figure that would take me forever and I would be earning no money while I'm doing it and it's really dull. So I thought, no, I'm not going to do that. Let's treat it like advertising. If I'm any good, let's treat it like advertising. So while I'm in here, what have I got access to? Well, all my mates are in the messenger's department, so we've got a Xerox machine. So I'll take my portfolio and I can copy out 50 copies of my portfolio, which I did, and they're all in the messenger department, so I can send all these out using the postage for nothing.

2:24:26So I went to the yellow pages and took out the first 50 names of advertising agencies out of that and sent out 50 copies of my portfolio. Then within a week, I got 30 people didn't even reply. Of the 20 that did reply, 19 of them said no. They didn't like any of it. And one of them said, I like this. It's really unusual. It's different. Come in for an interview. And that was John Webster. And he gave me the job. And he happened to be the best in London. And everybody else was looking for something the same. And John, being the best in London, was looking for something different. And I was doing something different.

2:25:04So it worked like a charm. So I stayed there and worked with him, worked with and for him for 10 years. What was his agency called? Well, then it was Bosemosimi Pollitt. Right. And where were they based? Where were they? Whereabouts in London? Paddington. Right. And they grew to be huge. But like all agencies, they merged and been taken over, and now they're called something else. And then what happened from there? Oh, well, then, you know, working with John and learning from John. And John was looking for a rebellious, which is what I'd learned in New York. and he was looking for stuff that caught on in the working class language, not just standard old boring middle class stuff.

2:25:44And it all worked great. And so I did so much advertising. I got really famous in, well, not really famous, but famous in a hurry, won loads of awards, loads of accounts, everything else. And eventually after 10 years, I left to start my own place. and that was Juju Tea Gold Ringley's Trot and that was great that was for 10 years that was terrific I had a great time and we did brilliant work and did you sell that like when did you make a lot of money yeah we sold it but that was for me the thing was never about money and I didn't want to sell it we only went public because the other two partners wanted to do it I never I never did it for money I did it because I love what I was doing yeah I think money's a by-product not an in-product and if you do if you love what you're doing you must be great at what you're doing and if you're great what you're doing money will arrive as opposed to if you chase money if you're not successful uh well you've lost always because you've got no money you don't love what you're doing whereas for my money if you love what you're doing even if you don't make money you still love what you're doing so you win one way and if you make money as well you win two ways so what were so what are the clients you had we had uh as i say toshiba ariston courage beer uh holston pills uh remember of them but you know lwt uh oh cabrish loads more stuff i was just i wasn't on the business side of it i was on this side doing ads They normally didn't let me near clients because my language is client friendly.

2:27:34My language is… The clients they would let me near, the clients I got all very well with, was chairman and managing directors and chief execs. Junior clients don't let me… Because junior clients are all about learning the jargon and whatever the latest jargon is, and I haven't got any patience for that. whereas with the owners or the managing directors or the chief execs, we can have a very fast conversation because they want to know how much is this going to cost me and what am I going to get for it and why will it work? And I can have that conversation with you very fast. I can't have a conversation based on two or three hours of jargon.

2:28:17What were the hard parts on that journey? Were there any moments when it felt like everything was, was it just a glorious success or were there moments when it was a bit, fucking hell. Because starting your own, any business is fucking hard. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, the first six months, obviously you haven't got any money. So we had to put our houses up against the bank loan. And we didn't pay ourselves any money. And we sort of live off our wife's salaries while we do that. And then after six months, we had just enough clients that we could pay ourselves. and we get our houses back from the bank.

2:28:56And then gradually, because everybody could see and the clients could see that our advertising was, A, very, very different to everybody else's and B, it was working, we began to get more and more accounts. And it was about being different. Well, of course, it's like it's anything, isn't it? Of course, it's about being different. If there's, you know, six zeros and right in the middle of them is an X, which one does your I go to? It's not one of the zeros, is it? You go to whatever's different. And we're in advertising. That's our job. If you can't be different, why are you doing this? Just to be the same as everybody else?

2:29:34You can be the same as everybody else without – don't spend any money. Keep your money in your pocket and you're the same as everybody else. You're wasting your money if you're spending it to be the same as everybody else. What's the – you talk about there's a difference between energy and creativity. What's the difference? Yeah. well I think that's so you can again football is my favorite analogy just look at it there what's the difference between energy and creativity you can have guys that run up and down the park all day and they still lose the match you the you you've got to think ultimately if we don't get more the the ball in their net more times than they get it in ours we lose no matter how much we run up and down the park.

2:30:15Don't work hard, work smart, you know? What other football analogies are there? Actually, if you wanted to finish that thread. Yeah, no, I was going to say one of my favourites was Carlo Ancelotti. He won the European Cup five times at different clubs, which is amazing, Carlo Ancelotti. And he said, I don't coach players for what to do when they've got the ball. I coach them for what to do when they've not got the ball. And as a creative director, that was really interesting for me. That's like the biggest, most important part isn't training people, it's hiring people. If you hire the right people, you don't have to watch them.

2:30:59They automatically want to do what you want to do. Michael Caine said he was on the set of The Man Who Would Be King with Sean Connery. And they said, Sean Connery said, Walter Houston or John Houston hadn't given them any direction. And Michael Caine said, you're right, he hasn't told us what he wants. So he grabbed John Houston and he said, you haven't given us any direction about what you want here. And John Houston said, Michael, he said, you only have to direct actors when you've got the casting room. And I thought that's absolutely great about hiring. That's why I would put all my time into hiring.

2:31:39When I hired people, the right people, they automatically want to do what I want. And all I've got to do is put in a little bit of correction here and there. When I've actually got to start worrying about are they motivated, are they happy, are they enjoying themselves, should we get some more beanbags in and foosball tables and cappuccino machines and have some yoga retreats, that's all because I've got the wrong people in. They don't actually want to be doing what I've done. And what I used to mainly love doing was hiring rejects, young kids who were rebels and rejects. And all I'm going to do is give you an opportunity.

2:32:14There's an opportunity here if you work really, really hard, flat out, all the hours God sends. If that's what you want to do, I can give you that opportunity. If that's not what you want to do, this is the wrong place for you, and you'll be miserable here. But if you've been a failure so far and you've been unhappy because you want to work your socks off and they won't let you do it at the places you're at, If you come here, I can let you do that, and you can get famous in a hurry, and this will be just what you want. All I've got to do is find the people that want to do that. So I put all my effort in interviewing loads and loads of people until I got people that were actually desperate to work, and what I was doing, I was giving them a lifeline.

2:32:54What's been one of the hardest days of your life? Hardest?

2:33:01Don't know, don't know. Don't pick it up like that. Don't pick it out like that. What do you mean? Like what's the hardest day? Mm. I mean, there have been some miserable days, but, you know, everybody has miserable days, don't they? Mm. What's been one of the miserable days? Well, you know, when you lose an account or you get an ad turned down, something that you love, and it doesn't run. That's it. the and does that how do you stay like upbeat and confident in yourself when that happens uh i don't know maybe go and get drunk come back tomorrow start again i love getting drunk it's i think it's actually quite a good especially in the in the age of all this like no drinking and stuff i actually think it's a superpower i flushes you through it does flushes yeah flushes you through literally i think it's like a few a few good old beers like really um keeps everything at bay what's the um the one plus one equals three how's that different to crossover because that's another one of your books it's very similar right okay yeah one plus one equals three is very similar you you put two things that shouldn't go together together like what was the be the most recent one uh salted caramel who would think they put salt and caramel together but it's brilliant you know and up comes this third thing that's now better than either of them on their own and uh obviously you do that as i say kubrick did it martin scorsese does it um the opening titles to Raging Bull.

2:34:50They've just got the guy dark in a hood, in a boxing ring on his own shot in black and white, just moving around boxing in slow motion over this piece of opera. That shouldn't work at all. And you'll find that. There used to be a really good restaurant that I liked a lot. I don't know if it happened to it, but called Belgo. Where was that? Belgo. It was in Camden Town. And it was, all it sold was beer. It was a Belgian restaurant. Beer and oysters served by guys dressed up like monks. That's hilarious. Yeah. And what I loved about it particularly was the beer menu. The beer menu was written like a wine menu.

2:35:39so each beer was really carefully described and there was about 15 or 20 beers on the menu and what was really clever about that is you couldn't just have one beer you'd have to try three or four different beers because you'd read about the beers and you you know i've tried this one but i haven't tried that one look what it says about that one you know and you you so you You drink more beer than you would at a pub, actually. At a restaurant, this is. That's so clever. Belgo, you may look it up. I will, because I love that world. What's one sentence you want in your gravestone? Okay, the... I heard this Zen master.

2:36:22Someone asked this Zen master once, what are we here for? What's it all about? What's the secret of life? and he thought a long while before he said, the answer asks the question. Hang on a sec. And I think that you're going to get it. The whole point is you don't get it. The answer asks. Let's stay with that and bring it up from time to time. The answer asks the question. Yeah, fucking hell. Yeah, just, you know, every few weeks just. Meditate on that. Just think about that. The answer asks the question. Mmm. That's so interesting. And what is the point that there's no point? Well, I think the answer is the question.

2:37:11Oh, fuck. That's so good. I'll be thinking about that. What's one truth you believe most people disagree with you on? uh well um work uh i mean kathy lucky my wife's chinese and she's an art director and we love to work flower and we love work more than fun and who is it nor cowder somebody said work is more fun than fun and when you get the job right like we have it actually i think that's the thing most people disagree with they all think that you should you should you know stop work and have a social life and all that sort of thing and i've never really wanted that work is we went to art school for this this is what we do you know what we trained for this is what we love and we get paid for it so and also it's just mad it's so lovely being in your house and seeing all this i might maybe take some pictures but like some all this crazy beautiful art that you've got on the walls it's like and you show me around it's just all this gorgeous beautiful stuff it's mad so what what what are you working on now what's your what sort of working day like in your creative do you write in the mornings do you write when do you write well well yeah what i always used to do was uh and it works best for me you you look and find when your productive period is because otherwise you can waste it having meetings totally hard agree yeah and for me my productive period was always from uh from getting out of bed till lunchtime yeah that was when i so that's when i'd work and then lunchtime uh i used to go to the gym uh but when i'd done that i'd go into the office and that's when i'd have meetings so all afternoon because i'm not very productive in the afternoon so that's the time to have meetings so uh and my my my philosophy was if you get the meeting right or the meetings are not just time killing things you get the meeting right uh it should flow the rest of the week should flow so every monday morning i used to have a traffic meeting with the whole agency at it and and all departments there so that all in front of each other so if there's a hole we go through every every account and if it's okay to get no problem move on no no if we've got a problem everybody's in the room to say what's the problem with so if account handling says the problem's planning planning's there to unblock it and if blocking says counting says the problem's creative i've got creative wrong here to unblock it once we find out where the problem is then i can unblock it then the rest of the week should flow then that'll take about two or three hours that meeting on a Monday morning, but the rest of the week would go like, like, clockwise.

2:40:02Yeah. Because you've done that. So that was one thing everybody used to disagree with, because my theory was most of our work was seasonal. 80 % of your work is seasonal, you know. What do you mean by seasonal? I wasn't like, what, winter? Seasons. Yeah. Screams sell in the summer. Holidays are all booked just after Christmas. You know, things like that. All your accounts, beer, you sell more in the summer. Guinness, you sell more in the winter. If it's your account, you pretty much know when your big sales periods are. So you know pretty much when you're going to need to advertise. So let's don't wait and have a big surprise.

2:40:47Let's work backwards from there. let's work if we know rather than have to all of a sudden panic and do something in a hurry, let's do this timely, if we know you're going to need to advertise in July let's put in six weeks to write to shoot the ads so we need them there two weeks to research the ads so we need them there two weeks for them to go ROM and redo them so we need them there so we're talking about to do it properly three or four months. So we should be briefing your July ads in February, not waiting until like June. So by working backwards from the end, we can have a lot more time to do this properly with a lot of thought and come up with a lot better product rather than just having to buy whatever's done.

2:41:40Mm-hmm. And so were you working all hours, all days on the way up? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So your creative energy, you know, you said now you've got the creative thing in the morning, or was it just an all-day? Or were you still doing the creative stuff in the morning, then the meetings in the evening, dinners in the evening, whatever? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it used to be that we were lucky if I got home. If I got home for 10 o 'clock no's, that would be average. And it used to be I'd go into the office at the weekend and most of the kids were in there working. I didn't make them come in. I didn't care if you were in there or not.

2:42:27If I didn't come in, they'd still come in and work because they were having more fun. They'd wasted three or four years of their young lives not getting work out at the agencies they were at. And it suddenly clicked to them, hang on, I'm getting towards 30 now and I haven't got a portfolio. And the work I have got, the couple of ads I have got, they're all getting brown and curly. Well, mate, what would we mean? We'll get you some TV commercials out. We'll get you dozens of press ads out and posters out. If you want, if you want to do the work, we can get them out. You want to spend watching TV or going over to the pub, that's up to you, but that's not doing the work.

2:43:03You can go over to TV and watch the pub, but they don't grumble when you haven't got a portfolio. So you work it out for yourself and it wasn't me. Those kids would. So I'd say to each of the kids, here's the key, just go into the office when you want. And what we'll have in the office, we'll have a tea urn and we'll have a toaster and we'll have butter and milk in the fridge so that if you're coming in, there'll be tea and coffee and toast and butter for you. The least we can do is feed you because we're not paying you overtime. them. So, but if you want to come in, and most of them coming, it's their happiest clams.

2:43:41That's what they want to be doing. Get their… And most of those guys either went on to be creative directors or own their own agencies. Because all I've got to do is a bit like, again, it's football. If you hire the right people, you haven't got to tell them what to do. It's like Ancelotti. All I've got to tell you to do is when you haven't got the ball, where to be when you haven't got the ball. once you've got the ball your creativity will take over i want to be in your head when you've got the ball i just want you i just want you doing what if you do naturally but what i want you when you haven't got the ball i want you in this position and he's in that position and he's over there so that once we get the ball then you do it yeah so smart uh what any other truths about maybe not about work but about life that people disagree with you on i don't know really i'm i'm I'm sure there are.

2:44:33I mean, generally, lots and lots of people don't like me, but lots and lots of people do. So my attitude is how many people there are on the planet? Nine billion? And how many people can I meet in my lifetime? If I can meet a new person every day in my lifetime, that's 350 a year. That's 1 ,000 every three years. So if I'm going to live, that's 10 ,000 every three years. Call it, say, 50 ,000 people in my lifetime I can meet at the absolute outside. Probably not. Maybe 10 ,000 is more like it, right? And there's 9 billion people on the planet. That means I can't meet 8 billion people. And, yeah, of those people I can meet, half of them are right for me and half of them are wrong.

2:45:24Why could I waste this? There's 8 billion people I can't even meet, and half of that 8 billion people are right for me, 4 billion people are right for me, 4 billion people are wrong, but 4 billion people are right for me, why would I waste a second with someone who's wrong? When there's more people that are right for me than I possibly can. Totally agree. Why would I waste a second trying to convert somebody who's wrong for me? And that's a lot of what I think the laziness that everybody does wrong is trying to convert But rather than just hurrying through life, and again, with business, rather than trying to convert people who don't want your product, well, you just talk to people who do.

2:46:07There's so many of them, if you just make the effort to look, are hiring like anything, like picking up members of the opposite sex. There's so many people that do want you if you just make the effort rather than trying to convert someone who doesn't. so good final question because this has been just so joyous in such a full circle moment for me dave after reading all your work man i read i read your work as i said uh david gluckman whose book you should definitely recommend it he recommends it to me when i first started the podcast and six years on i'm now sat in your house in hampshire recording with you so this has just been so joyous and such a full circle moment but yeah i know you read a lot and there's lots of books smattered around your house but like what are some of the one really good books that i should definitely read okay for you uh particularly um uh well you were telling me about what you did have you read george alwell down and out in paris and london yes i have did you like it yes i love yeah that's really really good yeah the um the what's sorry 1984 was the other the sorry no Have you read his poem about the pub under a white moon or something?

2:47:26He's got a great – it's an essay he wrote for a newspaper about the pub. And like, mate, you read that and it'll make you fall in blood. It's just a short essay. The White Moon Under the Sun, I've butchered it. It's like an amazing essay. It's like when you go into a pub and you read that. In fact, there's the Compton Arms in Islington. It's got it on the wall, which is a great pub. Yes, so any other books for me and then for other people you recommend? Well, if you're not, I mean, this is not for people that read a lot. This is for people who don't read. You start off, the book that started me reading was Damon Runyon.

2:48:03Actually, first time I realized you can actually have fun and laugh out loud reading. Is the title called Damon Runyon? Called Guys and Dolls. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and it's great to start out loud. It's great to start with fun books just to get the wheel rolling, you know. And then philosophically, if you're looking for books, think of Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, and what's great about that is you don't have to start at the beginning and plow your way through. You pick whoever you're most interested in, start there, and then just follow a thread to the different places. So you might start whoever you wanted to know about but never bothered.

2:48:49Like with me, it was Descartes. And then that would take you to Socrates. And then that would take you through to Plato. And then it depends where you're interested. And then that took me through to Occam's Razor, which takes you through to Barclay. But different people, it would take you different places. Wow. So who was he, Bertrand Russell? He was a British philosopher. But I like people who write, I like words that come off the page. I don't like books like textbooks. I've got to sit down and work on it. Yeah? And I think it's the writer's job to grab me, not my job to. What I like about that book is, as I say, you can pick, when you're reading Descartes, for argument's sake, you'll come to this bit and it will say, Whereas Descartes thought about, and he got this bit from Socrates.

2:49:42So you'll go right back to Socrates and read that bit. And he'll mention loads of other stuff you're not interested in. But he'll say, as Socrates, and it was later on picked up by Barclay, and then he'll take that. But if you're interested in that bit, you can then jump to Barclay. It's just chapters about everybody. And I love that. So easy to get into each one, yeah. Well, it's why, excuse me, I don't listen to podcasts. because they start and they carry on linearly like that, whereas writing I can chop and change and pick up where I like. And I like that a lot more. Then graphic novels are a great thing also.

2:50:24If you don't like reading a lot but you want information, graphic novels are great. Which ones? Well, I've got loads upstairs. Also, if you're at all interested in, if you're more visual rather than verbal, graphic novels are great. The part way why when you read my books, there's double spacing and loads and loads of space. That comes from Helmut Krohn, who was an art director. And when he did the first Volkswagen ads, he looked at the way type was laid out, was range left, range right, solid blocks of type. And what he realized is that's all right if you went to uni and you like reading broadsheets, but for ordinary people, that's really off-putting.

2:51:11Looks like hard work. So he cut in loads of indents and widows, and then he spaced everything out and put in loads of white space. So now it's really opened up, and it really looks easy and inviting to read. Before you get involved with the words, you get involved visually. Well, it's mad because now every LinkedIn post is now like that. But back then it wasn't like that. No, no, no. Now people in the age of, for like people writing on LinkedIn, Instagram, it's all that double spacing. Okay, so Bertrand Russell, any specific ones for me you think that would be really good? Any other books? Well, it depends what you want.

2:51:52Do you want them for entertainment and amusement or education or what? Entertainment Two for entertainment Two for education Then we'll wrap up Alan Corrin Anything Alan Corrin's written Right For entertainment You know Alan Corrin? Nah Oh mate Who is it? I'll get on to him Alan Corrin He's What's his crack? Well he's He's just the best Wittiest Funniest Not just funniest But wittiest Writer What does he write about? Well He would take An article out of the newspaper paper and then write three or four pages on it. So everything he's written is about two or three or four pages long. So you haven't got a book beginning and end that you've got to plow through.

2:52:37Much better for me is two or three or four pages each time. Yes. Lovely. I think like that. Ah, I'll tell you another great writer I love, Mick Heron. I've got a lot to read, mate. Yeah, Mick Heron, who's he? So have you ever seen that TV series Slow Horses? Uh, yes. I really struggle watching TV, but I watched four episodes of that. Read the books. The books are better than the TV. Really? TV's good, but the books are better. He's a great writer. I mean, for me, these are guys that I just keep promising myself, okay, I'll just read one more chapter, then I'll stop and go to bed. But you actually can't because you get the energy out of there.

2:53:18Oh, that's the best. When you're reading, I've got that with that John and Paul book at the minute. I can't. like just it's just getting getting better and better and better if you want john and paul all about the beatles i highly highly recommend it it just makes you like understand where they were for each song so it goes for every song see another thing i mean i'm not big on fiction the ones i'm giving you at the minute it's just fiction yeah another one of those uh that i read all of them i couldn't say it's patrick o 'brien patrick o 'brien you know the master and commander series no no someone recommended him to me and like those those are books i've actually missed tube stops because i've been reading oh wow you know i've been in the middle of it and i don't even notice what would stop i'm going past that's amazing there's about 23 books in that series uh they are great and then they're all fiction and then non-fiction uh what i love is a guy called i mean that it depends what you want in non-fiction lots of history there's a guy called eric von And Dershmid, who does a lot of, he did the hinge factors, which was all about, the hinge might be called a hinge of battle, which is every battle, where was the one point it turned?

2:54:28Wow. What was the one thing in every point that turned either a war or a battle, the one point? That's beautiful. That's really interesting. in um then uh uh he also did a great one uh called the whisper of the blade all about the french revolution i'd never been able to understand it because it's all been written dry as dust the french revolution until i read this and suddenly it all came to life the french revolution and now is that napoleon just before napoleon yeah so yeah what was going was that That was the terror with the French Revolution. Ah, yeah, that was Robespierre, the guillotines, yeah.

2:55:11Yeah, so what happened with that? How did it come to the French? What was the revolution? Well, there was the corruption of the monarchy and the starvation of the poor.

2:55:28and you had the revolution of initially it started gently, as these things do, and then kind of got out hand of what Lenin called the revolutionary elite took over. They would take over any revolution. Pretty much what's happening with MAGA at the moment in America. You start out with a lot of quite justified dissatisfaction from the bottom towards the top, and someone comes in and takes control of that. Over here it would be Faraj. Quite justified the way the bottom's being ignored, but someone then comes in and takes control of it and uses it for what it was never meant to be. and, you know, Hitler's Germany.

2:56:24Those things, it's like mass movements are always quite fascinating like that because you see it happening again and again and again and again throughout history and pretty much always the same way, you know. A lot of the other stuff I've got, ah, a lot of what I love is Eastern philosophy. so uh one i love called zen flesh zen bones about great then coans coans what they well they're little stories and like um the answer asked the question things that don't actually have an answer they're supposed to go in there and just occasionally go off like a debt charge they're not like a coffee table answer like here's an easy answer this is like this is a constant provocation and if there isn't an answer like what's the sound of one hand clapping but the struggle to answer it is actually maybe what we're doing here it takes you off the railway tracks of sluggish like ordinary thinking makes you go off piece slightly right interesting do you ever do you ever watch any of the ted talks uh no so i i i inhale a lot of podcasts so i the ted talks there's some great ted talks there's some rubbish ones too yeah you've got to be very picky about what you what you listen to but ken robinson you must listen to if you don't listen to anything else you must listen to ken robinson what's it about well initially it's about education but what you're like is it's about for instance he talks about what's wrong with education and what you ought to do.

2:58:09For instance, like there's a young girl there who kept being asked to leave school for being disruptive in class, not being naughty, just being fidgety and being disruptive and things like that. At one school there, the headmaster asked the mother to come in and he asked the little daughter, he put the daughter in his room and said, you sit there, me and mother and I going off for a chat for a minute. I'll turn the radio on for you. There's some music while you're sitting here. And he took her mother outside and the mother said, I know what you're going to say. You're going to ask for her to be expelled again, aren't you, for being disruptive?

2:58:50And he said, no. He said, just look through the window for a minute into the office. And the little girl listened to the music and then she stood up and then she started dancing around. And then she started dancing around the whole room. He said, you haven't got a disruptive child. You've got a dancer. he said and what you need to do is you need to send her to theater school or ballet school or dance school and the mother did and that little girl became the head of the royal ballet wow yeah and and because one teacher her headmaster noticed she wasn't disruptive normally at school you'd fix her by giving her ritalin or something giving her some drugs to and ken robertson talks about that how we need to change how we think about people and educate people yeah dave that's been an absolute joy mate thank you so much i've absolutely fucking love that and it's just yeah i've had sorry i had so many questions thank you so so much listening to the podcast i really really do appreciate it if you like that episode only if you liked it please do give it five stars subscribe tell all your friends families foes next door but one cat dog whatever please tell everyone about this podcast it means the world to me and i really want to understand what your pain points are as the new wave of challenger food and drink brands please do hit me up on linkedin search dan pope and hopefully we can together create a more meaningful and powerful podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brands thank you so much Thank you.