davetrott

In 1929 Alfred Butts was an architect.
In 1930 he was unemployed.
The Depression hit the entire world, many times bigger and worse than any subsequent recession.
Including this one.
Like a lot of unemployed creative people, Alfred Butts needed an outlet for his creativity.
Even if he didn’t have a job, he needed to be doing something.
He thought he’d like to invent a game.
But he didn’t just start creating on a whim, he knew he needed a brief.
And this is the part of the story that I admire most.
He did his own research and wrote his own brief.
He carefully analysed the games market.
So he listed all the existing games then divided them into three main categories:
1) Games that depended on chance and numbers, like bingo or dice.
2) Games that depended on skilful moves, like chess or draughts.
3) Word games, that depended on knowledge, like anagrams or crosswords.
Within this there were games with varying degrees of chance.
Backgammon for instance, featured a combination of chance and skill.
Butt saw the opportunity.
The gap in the market.
A competitive word game that was a combination of chance and skill.
Again he did the research himself.
He carefully studied the front page of the New York Times every day.
He added up how often every single letter was used.
And he gave the letters a value according to the frequency.
For instance, ‘e’ was the most common letter, therefore the easiest to use, so it should have the lowest score.
The letters ‘b’ and ‘h’ were less common, therefore they should have a higher score.
The letters ‘q’ and ‘z’ were hardly ever used.
So they must be the most difficult and should have the highest score.
And he called the game ‘Lexico’.
Butts tried to get the major games manufacturers interested but they all turned him down.
There was no precedent for this kind of game.
He sold a few games himself, but by 1934 he’d sold just 84 sets.
He changed the name to Criss Cross Words.
He began adding refinements to his initial idea.
He added a board, with different values on different squares.
And blank tiles that could be substituted for any letter.
But still, without advertising or distribution, hardly anyone knew about the game.
They say luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
That’s what happened to Alfred Butts.
In 1952, Jack Strauss, President of Macy’s Department Store, was on holiday nearby.
At the hotel he played the game, which was now called Scrabble.
When he got back to New York, he immediately placed a massive order.
With Macy’s involved the game had all the distribution and advertising it needed.
It began selling six thousand units a week.
Today, two million Scrabble sets are sold every year, in 29 languages.
Scrabble is sold in boxed sets, deluxe editions, pocket sets, magnetic travel sets.
For the visually handicapped, it’s sold in large format type or even Braille.
You can play Scrabble online, on Facebook, on video game console.
There’s a TV game show and even a World Scrabble Championship.
All because Alfred Butts knew the truth about creativity.

Discipline isn’t the enemy of creativity.
Discipline makes creativity happen.

During the nineteenth century the British did most of their fighting outside Europe.
That meant they were mechanised and their enemies weren’t.
They had rifles, machine guns, artillery, and were used to fighting people who mainly had spears.
The British had the technology, and therefore were unbeatable.
So World War One came as quite a shock.
What the British hadn’t noticed was that, in a European war, the enemy would have the same technology.
This is always a shock for people who believe in technology.
People who believe technology will give them an unbeatable advantage.
You can’t depend on technology once everyone’s got it.
Once the other side actually has the same as you, you have to depend on out-thinking them.
But of course, this isn’t what people believe.
They believe if they get the technology first they must win.
So it was in World War One.
Both sides tried to be first with aeroplanes.
Both sides tried to be first with poison gas.
Both sides tried to be first with flame-throwers.
But every time one side had the technology, the other side had it too.
That didn’t stop the unshakeable belief in technology.
And eventually Britain did develop a superior piece of technology.
They developed the tank.
The British had it first and no one else had it for several years.
So this should have changed everything right?
No.
Because the British just carried on with the same old conventional, cumbersome military tactics.
They changed the technology, but they didn’t change their thinking.
So the tank made no difference.
Meanwhile the Germans did the opposite.
Instead of changing their technology, they changed their thinking.
In 1918 they developed ‘Blitzkrieg’ tactics.
The opposite of all entrenched (pun intended) military thinking up to that point.
The opposite of what everyone was expecting.
And by changing their thinking they nearly won the war.
The combined might of Britain, France, and America just barely succeeded in stopping them.
Just.
Although twenty years later it didn’t.
The Germans used these Blitzkrieg tactics again at the start of World War Two.
They had learned to think differently and the allies hadn’t.
The result this time was that France was beaten in just six weeks.
And the British army was forced into a chaotic, humiliating retreat at Dunkirk.
The British kept relying on new technology with the same old thinking.
While the Germans relied on new thinking.
The proof of this concerns the British army that was driven out of France.
At that time it was the most mechanised army in the world.
After World War One, the British sold all their horses and switched to motorised transport.
The German army that beat them was powered mainly by horses.

The self-same horses they’d recently bought off the British army.

When I first got to New York I was 19.
I’d just left sleepy old London and arrived at the busiest, hippest city on the planet.
I went down the subway and stopped dead.
There was a huge poster opposite me saying YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE JEWISH.
This was only a couple of decades after the war.
It felt more like anti-Semitic graffiti than advertising.
But underneath it was a picture of a Chinese man, smiling and eating a sandwich.
And underneath that a line that said TO LOVE LEVY’S, REAL JEWISH RYE BREAD.
On the one hand it could have been offensive, but on the other hand it was actually fun.
I walked round the corner and there was the same poster headline.
But with a smiling Red Indian eating a sandwich.
And next to it another poster with a little black boy eating a sandwich.
Then a fat Irish cop eating a sandwich.
All with the headline: YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE JEWISH TO LOVE LEVY’S REAL JEWISH RYE BREAD.
And it became clear.
This was turning advertising on its head.
Until then all advertising showed perfect white people with perfect white teeth.
But the Levy’s posters treated that as a hick-town stereotype.
This was NEW YORK, we don’t go in for that hokey suburban stuff.
We’ve got the best, and the worst, of everything in the entire world, right here.
And everyone doesn’t look the same.
This is the real world, not the fake, patronising ad world.
And right then I knew I wanted to do advertising like that.
Many years later I heard the history of that campaign, and there’s a lesson there for all of us.
The man who owned Levy’s bakery in Brooklyn asked Bill Bernbach to look at his advertising.
Bernbach asked him where he ran his ads.
The man said he advertised in the Jewish Chronicle.
Bernbach said “There’s your problem.
You picked that paper because of its Jewish readership.
But most Jews are immigrants and they won’t eat packaged rye bread, they’ll buy it fresh from the bakery.
We have to find a new audience who don’t currently eat rye bread.”
So that became the strategy, to sell rye bread to people who didn’t normally eat rye bread: market growth not market share.
Now if we’d been doing that today we’d have stopped there.
All creative is allowed to do is execute the strategy.
So the ads would have featured attractive, white, crew-cut or ponytailed, blondes with perfect teeth, eating rye bread.
Because that’s the execution of that strategy.
But Bernbach didn’t stop at the strategy.
He knew the strategy is just about being right.
It isn’t about getting NOTICED and REMEMBERED.
That’s creative’s job, and that’s the function of controversy.
Which is why Bernbach decided that, in New York, the alternative to Jewish wasn’t white.
The alternative was: Chinese, Black, Irish, Native American, Japanese, Italian, Polish, Puerto Rican.
And visibility would come from celebrating what made New York different, not from hiding it.
And that’s what changed the Levy’s campaign from being just another piece of clever strategy to something much bigger.
Levy’s became the biggest selling rye bread in the entire city.
Then the biggest selling rye bread in the entire state.
Then the biggest selling in the entire country.

The strategy makes the advertising right.
The execution makes it great.

In 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait.
By 1991 it escalated into what became known as The First Gulf War.
Kuwait couldn’t be allowed to just fall into the hands of a military dictator.
Everyone was outraged.
Kuwait would have to be invaded.
Iraq would have to be thrown out.

So the USA put together a coalition of countries to provide troops, money, and weapons.
The coalition consisted of 34 countries:
Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Niger, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Portugal, Qatar, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Spain, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, the UK, and the U.S.A.
Pretty much everyone.
Except.
The country that was noticeable by its absence was Switzerland.
On the one hand they couldn’t condone what Saddam had done.
But on the other hand Switzerland was traditionally neutral.
For 500 years, and through two world wars, they stayed out of fights.
They just didn’t get involved.
Everyone knew it, and they were famous for it.
Whatever your quarrel was, and whoever it was with, it didn’t involve Switzerland.
That’s what everyone knew in 1991.
Which was when the coalition was getting ready to invade Kuwait.
And what everyone also knew was that Arab terrorists wouldn’t be too pleased about this.
In fact they’d probably try to retaliate any way they could.
They had pretty limited means.
They couldn’t compete with all those countries’ armed forces.
But they could hurt their civilians.
With the one weapon the terrorists had that no one else had.
Suicide bombers.
And the thing that was most vulnerable was civilian airliners.
So suddenly travel on those civilian airlines didn’t seem like such a good idea.
And all those countries pulled their advertising off TV.
But there was one airline that wasn’t a potential terrorist target.
The country that wasn’t part of the coalition.
The country that was historically neutral.
Switzerland.
Their airline could still advertise.
And, coincidentally, lots and lots of prime airline advertising space had just freed up.
So night after night, in the centre break of News At Ten, you’d see Swissair ads.
Right in the middle of all the news about the Gulf War.
Right in the middle of all those reminders of why you shouldn’t fly on any of the coalition airlines.
There’d be an advert for Swissair.
Reminding you, without needing to say it, that Swissair was still safe.
They didn’t have a fight with anyone.
And that is really smart advertising.

Using the context to do your advertising for you.

A couple of weeks back, Paul Bainsfair arranged for Adam Crozier to talk at the IPA,
Adam Crozier worked at Saatchi & Saatchi for ten years.
He went from being the media director to joint CEO.
Then, in a move that surprised everyone, he left Saatchi to become Chief Executive of the Football Association.
In short order he lowered the average age of the staff from 55 to 32.
He cut the FA’s ruling body from 91 members to just 12.
And he appointed the first ever non-English manager: Sven Goren Erickson.
Naturally, he put a lot of noses out of joint.

Read More »

My wife is Chinese, her father had two wives.
This was quite conservative by the standards of the day.
When she was at school, the other children came from families of three, four, even five wives.
I remember talking to someone she’d been at school with.
He told me his father had married three sisters, one after the other.
I asked him if the sisters didn’t mind.
He laughed and said they practically arranged it.

Read More »

Between 1750 and 1810 London doubled in size.
From 750,000 to one and a half million people.
It was the largest, most overcrowded city in the world.
It hadn’t grown by plan, it just happened.
Consequently there was no infrastructure for that many people.
There were no sewers in those days: every house had a cesspit.
That meant two hundred thousand cesspits all over London.

Read More »

In 1979 my art director, Mike Reynolds, and I drove into Downing Street.
Mike had a VW Campervan and we parked it opposite number ten.
You could in those days.
Tourists were taking photos of us as if we were important.
It was Saturday morning and a policeman let us in.
We were there for the advertising think-tank.
What everyone forgets is that until 1979 political parties in the UK didn’t use advertising agencies.
It was seen as a cheap American gimmick.

Read More »

I am constantly amazed at how we make such hard work out of what we do.
What we do is simple.
We go from A to B.
But we are petrified of a straight line.
If we were cab drivers we’d go from London to Birmingham via Cornwall.
Why are we so terrified of simplicity?
I was just interviewed by the BBC for a programme they are making for China.
The Chinese have just discovered they can be massively successful manufacturing goods competitively.
So now they need to talk to consumers.
Which means marketing and advertising.

Read More »

When I was 30, Leo Burnett offered me the creative director’s job.
At the time 30 was considered too young, so I had to go to the head office in Chicago to be interviewed.
This was a new experience in corporate America for me.
I met the President in the lobby and we got on the elevator.
A secretary was drinking a can of Coke.
The President looked at her and asked “What is that?”
The entire elevator went quiet.
The secretary turned red and became flustered.
“Omigish, I am so sorry. I asked for Royal Crown Cola but they were all sold out. I am so sorry. I promise I will never happen again.”

Read More »