Har du någon gång tvivlat på dig själv som skribent? Har du upplevt att orden sviker dig när du behöver dem som mest? Har du svårt för att komma igång? Svårt att få idéer? Veta vad som ska strykas? Finna den rätta närvaron? Söka dig under läsarens radar och röra vid läsarens innersta strängar?

Du är inte ensam. Det är frågor som de flesta skribenter ställer sig då och då. Men den erfarna skribenten har en insikter och verktyg för att hitta ut ur problemet.

Den nittonde september startar min nya copykurs på distans i Batteris regi. Vi börjar med ett frivilligt seminarium i Stockholm och redan på kvällen får du ditt första kursbrev. Efter tio veckors hårdkörning vet du om du är höstens nya copystjärna. Läs mer om kursen på Batteri.se.

Stop pursuing your goals. In his book, »Obliquity«, by John Kay presents an idea that flies in the face of corporate practice and process thinking. Kay claims that goals are best achieved not directly, but indirectly. And this is relevant not only in business, but in all areas of life.

The most profitable companies are not the most aggressive profit-chasers. The wealthiest men and women are not the most materialistic. And the happiest people do not pursue happiness in itself. The goals are mostly reached as a spin off from something else: meaning.

Kay leans toward six creative attitudes towards problem solving and life in general.

”Muddling through”. By this he stresses the importance of approaching a dilemma in a non-rational, intuitive way but at the same time according to some kind of plan. Hm… this sound familiar… Ah, yes! In my book, »Let’s get gorgeous«, I wrote something like this: Fix your eyes to the top (a higher purpose) and follow your instincts like a curious fool. In a zig-zag way. Like a child wandering about, devoted and wide-eyed, disrespectful, foolhardy and reinvestigative.

Pluralism. In the business world people tend to think that there is only one solution to a problem. This is wrong, there are more than one answer to a problem.

Interaction. The outcome has more to do with the question ?Why?” than ”What?”. Problem is, in a process-obsessed world the former is much harder to find an answer to than the latter. You can read my more about it here.

Incompleteness. We like to think that we know enough about the nature of our problem. But we rarely do.

Abstraction. Models are always imperfect descriptions of reality. And should therefore be handled with suspicion.

Complexity. The world is far too complex to understand and manage.

Well, what can I say? Kay is one of the few economist who understand the creative mind.

I reklambranschen finns människor med många olika bakgrunder. Gemensamt för framgångsrika kreatörer är förmågan att överskrida gränser och trotsa normer, som det så fint brukar heta. Framförallt handlar det om att låta tankarna få ta den väg de själva vill ta, som du tillät dem när du var liten, utan att ditt nitiska, kritiska sinne slår larm och föser tillbaka dem till det normala igen.

En idé blir pratbar först när den kläs i ord. Det är i det här nakna stadiet vi bedömer dem och väljer att förkasta eller vidareutveckla dem.

En man satt på en trottoar i New York. Framför sig hade han en låda med några mynt och bredvid den fanns en skylt med de handtextade orden »I’m blind«.

En copywriter stannade upp och började prata med mannen. Han sade: »Jag har sett dig sitta här dag ut och dag in, men aldrig med mer än kaffepengar i lådan. Det måste vara tufft för dig.«

Mannen nickade och svarade: »Det har varit tufft. Folk skänker inte lika mycket som förr.«

Copywritern: »Jag tror att jag kan hjälpa dig. Får jag skriva några ord på din skylt?«

»Visst«, sa den blinde, som antagligen tänkte att han inte hade något att förlora.

Copywritern klottrade dit några ord och lämnade mannen.

Några veckor senare stannade han åter till vid den blinde mannen och frågade: »Nå, hur har affärerna gått sedan sist?«

Den blinde: »Fantastiskt! Men säg mig, vad skrev du egentligen på skylten?«

Copywritern: »It’s spring. And I’m blind.«

Den här historien visar skillnaden mellan en vanlig skribent och en copywriter. Den förste skriver, den andre får saker att hända.

Vill du också kunna skriva så att folk stannar upp, byter tankebana, bli intresserade, ändrar åsikt och beslutar sig för att lägga pengar på något som de hade tänkt använda till något helt annat?

Då rekommenderar jag min nya kurs Professionell Copywriter. Efter drygt tjugofem års daglig träning på att skriva kort, långt, roligt, spännande, lättsamt eller seriöst om allt från köttbullar till finansiella tjänster, är det dags för mig att dela med mig av mina erfarenheter.

Det rör sig om en distanskurs över tio veckor i Batteris regi. Den hjälper dig att utveckla din förmåga att skriva säljande texter och föra ut ett budskap genom flera olika medieplattformar – som tv, radio, print, digitala medier, direktreklam, butiker, pr, säljbrev, kund- och medlemstidningar – samt att forma dynamiska varumärkesmanifest.

Kursen innehåller fyra moment. (Med reservation för smärre ändringar.)
1. Att tänka på innan du skriver (4 brev)
2. Lär dig konsten att förföra (4 brev)
3. Konsten att fängsla dina läsare (19 brev)
4. Bli mer kreativ (3 brev)

Vi startar med ett halvdagsseminarium 18 februari (första kursbrevet 21 februari). I kursen ingår också fem större uppgifter som vi diskuterar både gemensamt och individuellt i vårt virtuella klassrum. Var beredd på att behöva lägga ner cirka 10-12 timmar per vecka. Anmäler du dig innan den sista januari får du dessutom min senaste bok Den mentala orgasmen utan extra kostnad.

Kursen kostar 17.975 kronor (exklusive moms). Anmäl dig här.

Hur fungerar filmen? Vad kommer att hända i folks tankar och känslor när de ser den? Och ännu viktigare, kommer den att sälja mer av Cadbury’s chokladkakor?

Som professionell copywriter förväntas du kunna svara på frågor som dessa. Och det snabbt. Särskilt när du själv står bakom idén.

Är du det minsta osäker kan jag rekommendera min nya distanskurs i copywriting.

Kursen, Professionell Copywriter, drivs i Batteris regi. Det är en idé- och skrivkurs som sträcker sig över tio veckor och vänder sig till dig som vill vässa förmågan att skriva reklam för tv, radio, print, digitala medier, direktreklam, butiker, pr, säljbrev, kund- och medlemstidningar, samt att forma dynamiska varumärkesmanifest.

Anmäl dig till min nya distanskurs i copywriting så får du veta mer.

Professionell Copywriter är en distanskurs över tio veckor i Batteris regi. Vill du vässa ditt skrivande och tänkande tycker jag du ska hänga på. Efter drygt tjugofem års daglig träning av att skriva kort, långt, roligt, spännande, lättsamt eller seriöst om allt från köttbullar till finansiella tjänster känner jag att det är dags att dela med mig av mina erfarenheter.

Kursens syftar till att utveckla din förmåga att föra ut ett budskap genom flera olika medieplattformar, som tv, radio, print, digitala medier, direktreklam, butiker, pr, säljbrev, kund- och medlemstidningar, samt att forma dynamiska varumärkesmanifest.

Kursen innehåller fyra moment. (Med reservation för smärre ändringar.)

1. Att tänka på innan du skriver (4 brev)

2. Lär dig konsten att förföra (4 brev)

3. Konsten att fängsla dina läsare (19 brev)

4. Bli mer kreativ (3 brev)

Vi startar med ett halvdagsseminarium 18 februari (första kursbrevet 21 februari). I kursen ingår också fem större uppgifter som vi diskuterar både gemensamt och individuellt i vårt virtuella klassrum. Anmäler du dig innan den sista januari får du min senaste bok Den mentala orgasmen utan extra kostnad.

Jesus, I had no idea. I’ve been heavily manipulated during the last weeks.
I guess you have too.
All my actions have been forecasted and meticulously planned out by a red, powerful force.
And it’ suddenly dawned on me that I haven’t been celebrating christmas at all.
I’ve had a brand experience.
It’s called *Santa*.
Have a look at these brand guidelines and be inspired.
(Thanks Tore, for the tip. Originally from Quiteroom.)

Recently I posted an article about brutal creative directors. My advice was to get your book out there as fast as you can. Now, if I may, a few words on what I think makes a good creative director.

I once read that a coach’s main job is to love his players. I think the same holds true for creative directors. Advertising is so hard. There is so much rejection, so much brutality, so many late nights. To be able to motivate people in such a business, you have to love them and they have to know it. Not everyone feels this way. A famous CD once confided to me, “You need to have people fear you.” I disagree. Life is short and this is just advertising, people. If this means I’ll always produce less stellar work than a much-feared-CD, I’m okay with that. We all have our priorities. Those are mine.

Good creative directors need to get to know their people. I’ve heard of CDs who dig a moat around their office and meet only with the senior creatives; never with anyone lower down the food chain. This, too, I think is probably the wrong way to go about it. You need to know and love the people who are manning your trenches. You need to know their names, you need to know what they’re working on, you need to know when they do something great so you can lean into their offices and say, “Dude, that was great.” Soldiers do not charge machine-gun nests for generals they do not love.

Good CDs not only improve your work, they improve you. Someone once told me that a great creative director is a “career accelerator.” These are bosses who leave your career in better shape than they found it. That requires someone who is not completely wrapped up in either themselves or the pressures of doing good work. They manage to keep an eye on the lives and the souls of the people who are working for them.

This takes me to a concept I’ve heard described as the “servant leader.”  Writer James Kouzes wrote that such leaders “do not place themselves at the center; they place others there. They do not seek the attention of people; they give it to others. They do not focus on satisfying their own aims and desires [but on] the needs and interests of their people. They know that serving others is the most rewarding of all leadership tasks.”

Wow. Sounds a little altruistic put like that, but then I think of a guy like Mike Hughes at The Martin Agency and I realize, hey, he’s right. Here’s a guy who has been quietly building one of the best agencies anywhere and doing it by serving his people, serving his agency, doing it without an ego, and without beating on or intimidating the folks who work there.

Perhaps another day we can talk about all the other things it takes to be a good creative director,  one of which of course is being a good creative. But for my money the most important thing is being a good person – Honest. Level-headed. Friendly. Approachable. And humble.

UPDATE: Since the first issue of this essay on a different website: Mike Hughes, my old boss at The Martin Agency, kindly wrote to me to tell me he agreed with the sentiments in this essay, with one exception: that a good CD has to have been a good creative. He gave several examples, one of which was Bill Bernbach. Mike told me, “They are totally different skill sets.” I think he is correct. I amend my remarks. Thanks, Mike.

FOOTNOTE: There’s a great article on what it takes to be a good creative director posted by the Denver Egoist which you’ll find here.

Luke Sullivan ia a nationally acclaimed copywriter with a 30-year track record, Luke Sullivan is Senior VP/Managing Group Creative Director at GSD&M, a self-described “ad geek” and the author of the best-selling book, Hey Whipple, Squeeze This: A Guide to Creating Great Advertising. Luke’s experience includes 10 years at Fallon and five at The Martin Agency, with work for Miller Lite, United Airlines, Toyota, Black & Decker, BMW, Porsche and AT&T. He has more than twenty medals to his credit in the prestigious One Show and has served as judge for many creative award shows. Check out Luke’s blog: Hey Whipple.

Digital stuff has been bugging me as long as I can remember.
But I’ve always felt ashamed to admit it.
Imagine my relief when I found a link on Twitter from Brandoholic about Steve Wozniak talking openly about his frustration with tech, and his hesitations about a tech-dominated society.

Here’s an excerpt from an article by Mark Millan on CNN.com:

Wozniak said the biggest obstacle with the growing prevalence of technology is that our personal devices are unreliable.

»Little things that work one day; they don’t work the next day,» he said enthusiastically, waving his hands. »I think it’s much harder today than ever before to basically know that something you have … is going to work tomorrow.«

Reciting an all-too-common living-room frustration, Wozniak told a story about the countless hours he spent trying to troubleshoot his media player, called Slingbox.

»There is no solution,« Wozniak said of tech troubles. »Everything has a computer in it nowadays; everything with a computer is going to fail. The solution is: kill the people who invented these things,« he said with a smile.

Thank God. I mean, thank Woz.

I‘m tired of hearing people proclaiming the death of advertising.
My guess is I’m not the only one.
Truth to be told, the grim reapers of this industry have been around since
Don Draper wore diapers, predicting the future with the finesse of an elephant
in ballet slippers.
First, what is advertising?
It’s the art of persuasion, making people buy your subjective view on reality.
And why does advertising work again?
Simply because the reality is more complex than the human senses can grasp.
People will always buy the interpretation that best fits their perception of truth.
Be it new. Or exciting. Or funny. But it always has to be authentic.

Once upon a time, radio was going to kill print advertising.
Well, it didn’t.
Then television entered the scene as the ruthless slayer of radio ads.
It didn’t happen either.
When I started in this business I heard lot of of jinx about video killing tv.
Guess what? Tv is more popular than ever.
Then came the banner ads, the final nail in the advertising coffin.
The result? People hardly noticed the banners.
Because the banners were even more intrusive than the traditional advertising.

A few years later we were hit by a new technological revolution.
Social media was expected to forever change the rules of advertising.
It was regarded as the consumer’s final weapon against intrusive advertising.
Suddenly people had the power to block out all advertising, except the kind they really wanted to embrace.
We will soon remember this era as the weird days of interactive advertising.
In which the main idea was that everybody would love to talk to their peers about
the brands they like, interact with them, and gather in huge fan groups.
And yes, the consumers did interact – but not with brands. Only with each other.
(Except the one-in-a-million brand that were already of cult status.)
Fact one, these conversations are almost never about brands.
Fact two, people have always been able to block out bad advertising.
It’s called the RAS. I.e. the reticular activating system.
This is a part of the mammalian brain located in the brain stem, which uncounsiously lets you block out irrelevant ads.

Then came YouTube and put a new buzzword on the agency agenda.
All of a sudden everybody was buzy making a viral success.
But it wasn’t long before people got their head around the fact that a viral video
has a death rate that would make Pol Pot look like mother Theresa.
Speaking about crap, when the ad-space is free it gets crowded fast.
And ninety-nine percent of that space is filled with… you guessed it right:
Crap.
Crap costs money.
Which is usually the case with the overrated Anderson idea of ”the long tail” and
the concept of ”free”.
These might work perfectly for a few companies.
But for the average business owner it’s just fancy words for a crappy model.

Yes, there is a pattern here.
The advertising apocalypses is always sparked by technical developments.
The lesson here is that tech is not the solution.
We have to learn that technological advances are only means to and end.
And the end is always persuasion. The art of making people believe you.
Because you can’t trick yourself inside a persons mind.
There are no shortcuts. No free lunches.
You have to charm your way in.
If you’re dishonest, out of sync, irrelevant, boring, greedy, or plain stupid,
you’re not going anywhere, except spending the clients money.

Contrary to popular social media-opinion, making people to like ads isn’t
exactly new. It isn’t forced into existence by the digital technology.
It’s the timeless, immutable rule of all advertising.
Bernbach used to talk about this. So did Hopkins, and so are we.
It’s just that competition stiffens day by day and makes this increasingly
harder to accomplish. Regardless of media.

Have a look at the ancient, traditional ad above, made by DDB New York.
It was made more than fifty years ago.
Then ask yourself if this ad could work today.
I think it could.
The noble art of persuasion isn’t dead. Not in a million years.
It’s vibrant, constantly adapting, and as tenacious as mankind itself.
And the reason for this is very simple.
We see ourselves in it.

Apple’s famous 1984 TV spot reached around 38,000,000 eyeballs watching the Superbowl the only day it ran.

YouTube has added  5,879,629 viewers since, (as of November 1, 2010).

Nike “write the future” has to date 21,350,482 views .

That’s almost 4 times more than Apple’s 16 year old TV spot. On YouTube.

But also way below Apple’s original Super Bowl viewership.

The soccer world cup was watched by close to 100 million Americans, so worldwide I reckon the Nike spot must be among the most watched TV spots ever.

Even though Nike and its agency probably hoped that viral would be huge with Rooney playing a fat old loser, it was first and foremost a TV spot, aimed at an enormous TV audience worldwide. Nobody would spend so much money on speculation of possible viral spread.

However. Arguing that viral is for free is a faulty argument. Aside from crappy and crazy home videos that for strange and largely unpredictable reasons go viral big time, the cost of producing anything worthwhile isn’t exactly gratis.

And predicting anything to go viral is not a media strategy any professional would even dream of recommending.

YouTube is basically a total guess. Nobody might see your ad. While a big TV event with a huge audience guarantees your ad will have  a certain predicted reach in the millions.

Reach is of course not the same as effectiveness. It’s just a possibility.

Of Apple’s Super Bowl ads, 1984 is the only one anyone seems to remember. The follow up ad the year after,  “Lemmings”,  reached just as many people. But it’s not at all as well or fondly remembered. YouTube views are a dismal 32,000 plus.

Today all the rage is , as nobody could have missed, all about social, web and interactive. Although, as an advertising channel the web is still rather small. And the efficacy is still largely debated. No major brand has yet been built on the web alone, aside from web brands such as Google, Amazon and Zappos.

To get anywhere near so called traditional media in effective reach is not likely with web based media channels, including social media sites and (not so possible) viral effects. But it certainly sounds as if the web is by far the biggest and most effective channel out there listening to all the noise it’s created in the advertising industry and among clients hoping for wonders.

The record number of YouTube views is probably Justin Bieber with 3.7 million views a day in September this year, adding up to over a billion views. Did he sell a billion records?

Lady Gaga is another artist with monthly views in the millions per month.

Those may be businesses but are not advertising brands.

Ikea gets a couple of hundred thousand YouTube views at best for their real ads.

While views are in the millions  for spoofs and parodies done outside the control of the company. “Ads” they’d never approve if they had a chance to.

Volvo three years ago had a viral success of sorts with a video called “Volvo S60 TS 5 kills Ferrari”. It’s a shaky home made video, so far getting almost 390, 000 views. Not made by any of Volvo’s agencies.

Normally Volvo gets views counted in the low thousands. Yes, thousands. Not hundred thousands. You don’t produce costly spots for that sort of viewership. Only if it’s something like a crazy road race, illegal driving, vomiting and cursing, will the numbers go up to 6 digits.

Pepsi’s Michael Jackson is up to 15,776,603 views as of Ocober 28, 2.48 PM, New York time. It was put up a year ago, so it obviously has more to do with MJ’s rebirth, than it has to do with Pepsi the brand.

As mentioned in the beginning, the closest to TV numbers online for a brand may be Nike with its “Write the future”. Which when I write this has more than 21,000,000 views.

That’s impressive.

However. Super Bowl 2010 had more than 106,000,000 TV viewers, and the final episode of M.A.S.H. 1983 had over 105,000,000 TV viewers.

Which leads me to events.

Events create more interest than anything else. Whether it’s in sports, movie events like the Oscars, or royal weddings.

It seems as if one of the few ways to reach a huge audience in one go today is to piggyback on a well watched event. Or create one.

The media landscape is so extremely fragmented and complex. With hundreds and hundreds of TV channels, outdoor advertising spaces everywhere from garbage bins to wildpostings on empty walls to taxis to hoardings, banners and posters and what not, including the clothes you wear.  Wherever you look there are ads, ads, ads and more ads. Web banners on a trillion sites, facebook pages, etc. etc. How much can you take in?

Consequently a clever headline, beautifully crafted type, a nice photo, a neat and well balanced lay-out don’t cut it anymore.

Neither does the formulaic 30 second spot. If it ever did?

And talking about new media, web banners on the whole long ago stopped working.

Doing something with a chance to go viral is easier said than done. To complicate things is that what’s going viral on a big scale is all too often something that most brands don’t want to be associated with. Dirty jokes, juvenile pranks, sexual innuendo etc. Or it’s a well viewed TV spot that gets extended life online.

Viral is not a strategy. It’s a lottery.

Although you can buy ads on Youtube obviously. And end up in front of successful clips.

But that isn’t exactly for free either. And personally, I can’t wait until the disruption is over, and with the new function where you can click out of the ad, well, many of us will. Because unlike sitting laidback in the sofa watching TV, we’re quite active and impatient when online.

Even so, advertising is not dead. It’s just become so ubiquitous that we’re basically immune. It’s no longer enough to advertise. It may not even be enough to come up with a brilliant ad.

No matter how big or small the logo is, people today are so ad-literate they can smell an ad even when it tries hard not to look or feel like one. Product placement is often so clumsily done that it may backfire rather than having a positive impact. The cheese factor reaching Himalaya heights.

So what can an advertiser do?

Create an event.

Build something bigger than the ad. Make something to talk about. And weave the advertising around it.

What is an event?

I don’t mean a circus tent or a fair. I mean something that is more than an ad campaign, be it expressed in a print campaign, TV, online, mobile, instore, etc. or all media combined. Nike+ is what I’d like to call an event.

It isn’t just an ad for a runner shoe. It isn’t just a web site with pictures of shoes and tips for runners. It is engagement. An ongoing event. And event the audience can partake in. Not just view. For serious and semi serious runners it’s “Just Do It” on a whole other scale. Which resonates beyond the core target group. It also raises the positive perception of the brand among people who may only buy a pair of shoes to promenade to the car or the subway in.

It engages. Doing, not just talking.

Honda’s diesel engine work “Hate Something, Change Something” was more than a couple of ads and some web stuff. It was not just a clever ad campaign, it came out of some real thinking and engineering. It gained fame in our industry for its sweet TV spot, but it was way more than that.

It’s an ongoing event, taking place not just in the marketing department but in the factories and the R&D department. The agency did a brilliant job of bringing it to the masses.

The big idea was in the product development.

The big advertising idea was in taking the words of the inventor and making it pretty and charming and engaging. Doing, and talking about the doing. In a creative and brilliant way.

Thus it won every conceivable award and was talked about not just among ad folks. It sold diesel engines. It made diesel engines look very different from the perception they had in peoples minds. Especially Honda’s engines. It was not an ad campaign, but an event that changed things.

Ogilvy’s Conquer China for the North Face was an event. Inviting the audience to participate by putting flags like explorers do, all over China. So it become something to follow and talk about. It was not just a stunt. It was an idea that emerged from the core of the brand. It was way more effective than any traditional ad. The ads became more than ads. Check out ogilvyaction and look for the Red Flag Movement.

What is an event? Well, an event is often what evening papers sell copies based on. A major train robbery becomes an event for weeks, maybe for months, even years. It transfixes the man in the street for a period of time and often remains as a life long memory.

The recent drama in Chile, with 33 miners trapped for many weeks, and thankfully saved, was on every news channel in every part of the world. It became a media event, a PR event, and it will be turned into books and movies.

So the first job is not to create an ad. It’s to come up with something to talk about. And then figure out a way to dramatize it in such a convincing and engaging way that it breaks trough the clutter.

Of course, coming up with events that compete with the real world’s drama might not be an easy task. But it sure does have a better chance than a couple of ads where the idea is an ad idea rather than an idea based on something somewhat bigger.

The big idea is no longer a tag line or an ad. It’s “what can make us talked about?” In a good way.

Ads seem a little unimportant in today’s world. That is why creating an event is important than creating an ad. Using every possible creative solution and media channel to tell the story.

We like to say that modern advertising is not a one way monologue but a two way conversation. Personally I don’t think it’s so simple. People don’t want to have a conversation with their brand. But they might want to have a conversation about something. That “something” is rarely an ad. But it can be related to a brand. About a brand.

In other words. Don’t try to come up with an ad. Come up with something that’s bigger than an ad.

By Tore Claesson. He has been an Art Director and Creative Director at agencies around the world over the past 25 years or so. Still alive and kicking.

Mattias är en av få, förutom mig själv, som utgår från Ken Wilbers integrerade teorier.
Fast vi förklarar på lite olika vis.
Det här är Mattias version, del 1.
Om hur man gör budskap intressanta och hur man når framgång i sociala medier.

Yesterday I decided to watch an old favourite. ”Bagdad Café”. A Percy Adlon film. Starring Marianne Sägebrächt, CCH Pounder and Jack Palance. If you missed it, this is a cult movie from 1987, about ”the little café just around the bend”, set in the desert not far from Las Vegas.

I wanted to relive this beautiful story. I couldn’t wait to meet the characters again, and enjoy ”Calling you” by Jevetta Steele. Since I loved the film, I took for granted that I remember the film scene by scene, like they were forever etched into my mind. But I were in for a surprise.

Although the film is a classic, many scenes had somehow escaped my memory. It seems like I only took away the emotional parts from the film, but not the factual. Many scenes were erased from my memory and I were stunned by all the details I had missed out.

I know the brain doesn’t work like a video recorder. I’m fully aware that it doesn’t recall the facts, only what is meaningful. I have known this for quite some time, but I hadn’t really experienced it.

And now when I have, I can finally come to a conclusion.

Time distorts facts. But not feelings.

Facts doesn’t last as long as the impressions they make.

My wife is Chinese, her religion is Taoist.
In Taoism, clairvoyance is accepted as quite a normal thing.
But I’m from East London.
So I was brought up to believe it’s mumbo jumbo.
In fact, anything that didn’t obey conventional, ordinary working-class English standards was just superstition.
When we started going out together, Cathy asked me if I’d like to see a clairvoyant she uses.
All of my ingrained prejudices kicked in straight away.
My instinctive reaction was “No way!”
But I find continued ignorance lies in reacting.
And knowledge lies in experimenting.
I suspected clairvoyance was just nonsense for gullible people.
Like horoscopes.
But, even if it was, I’d know more about it if I actually gave it a try.
At least then I could reject it from a position of knowledge.
So I went along with Cathy one evening.
It wasn’t what I was expecting.
It wasn’t beanbags, and incense, and whale music.
It was a sweet little old lady called Nancy, who lived in Uxbridge.
We sat down, had a cup of tea, and started to talk.
She said to me “I’m getting someone from the other side. A policeman with a little baby on his knee. Do the names John, and James, and Amelia mean anything to you?”
I didn’t quite know what to say.
My dad had been a policeman all his life.
Maybe Cathy knew that and she could have mentioned it to Nancy.
But my dad had always been called Jack by everyone that knew him.
No one, except his family, knew his real first names were John James.
And there was something else.
When my sister became pregnant her appendix burst.
The baby was born prematurely and lived just ten days.
It was a little girl called Amelia.
No one outside my immediate family knew that.
I didn’t know what to say.
I had been expecting a charlatan.
Someone who would say, “You are going on a long trip some time in the future.”
Meaningless platitudes that could be twisted to fit any situation.
But this was different, this was pinpoint accuracy.
I find the best position to take in these circumstances is to be agnostic.
Don’t be an evangelist or an atheist.
Just suspend judgement, and see where things lead.
On a later visit, Nancy said to me, “I see you’re going to get the Holsten Pils account next month.”
Afterwards, I said to Cathy “She’s getting confused. We’ll get Truman Bitter and David Abbott will get Holsten Pils.”
Next month, while we were on holiday, I got a message from the agency.
“They just gave us the Holsten Pils account, without a pitch.”
I thought clairvoyance was supposed to be just vague predictions that could apply to anyone.
I wasn’t expecting names and dates.
A year or so later, Nancy told us we’d have two children, a girl when Cathy was 37 and a boy when she was 39.
I was upset, I didn’t want to wait that long, so I ignored it.
We tried for years but nothing happened.
Then, when Cathy was 37 she got pregnant.
But she had a miscarriage.
I was furious.
I said, “So much for clairvoyants.”
But Cathy got pregnant again.
And our daughter was born two weeks before Cathy was 38, and our son was born two weeks before Cathy was 40.
So where does that leave us as far as a view on clairvoyance goes?
Well, the mind decides on a position, then makes the facts fit.
So, if you want to find a way to believe, you will.
And, if you want to find a way to rubbish it, you will.
Me, I think it’s like anything else, there are good ones and bad ones.
Good and bad mechanics, acupuncturists, plumbers, lawyers, florists.
Why should clairvoyants be any different?
And as for superstition.
We know that £18.3 billion was spent last year on all forms of advertising and marketing.
We know 4% was remembered positively.
We know 7% was remembered negatively.
We know 89% wasn’t noticed or remembered.
Which means marketing and advertising experts spent around £16 billion on advertising that didn’t work.
In the belief, the hope, that somehow it would.
What’s that if it isn’t superstition?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to treat what we do the same way?
Keep an open mind.
Accept there is good and bad in everything.
In fact, we can go further.
We know from the facts we’re given that, in advertising as in everything else, roughly 90% doesn’t work.
So let’s make sure we only deal with the 10% that does.
Let’s deal in facts, not superstition.

Dave Trott was born in Barking in East London.
He got a degree in advertising from Pratt Institute in New York.
Trained mainly at Carl Ally on Madison Avenue.
Then came back to London in 1970 and got a job at BMP.
In 1980 he left BMP to start Gold Greenlees Trott.
Campaign voted GGT “Agency Of The Year” and New York’s Advertising Age voted it “Most Creative Agency In The World”.
Dave currently works at CST Advertising.
He’s proudest of the work he’s done on Anti Third World Debt advertising, with people like Gordon Smith and Paul Arden.
More of his thoughts on Dave’s blog.

This morning I came close to being run over by a crazy woman, running like a Kenyan on speed, with her eyes glued to her iPhone.
She was soon followed by a bunch of other maniacs, including a bloke in a wheel-chair, all running and stumbling, with their eyes wide open.
What’s this all about?, I asked myself.
I discovered that there are a lot of buzz about it in the papers and social media.
And that a couple of friends of mine were the brains behind the event.
So I called their agency, Jung von Matt in Stockholm, and asked what the hell they were up to.
”Oh, that’s our new campaign for the MINI Countryman.”

Here’s the deal.
The MINI is all about engagement. Let’s motor. Let’s have fun!
To succesfully launch the MINI Countryman the company wanted the agency to present it to the swedish public in a truly engaging way, as a part of the international Getaway concept.
People has to get involved in the brand’s core message.
All marketing has to mirror the bond between the driver and the brand.
So they created a live, social gps-game, ”Getaway Stockholm 2010”.
Probably the world’s first of its kind.
Neither Playstation or Sega, have even come close before.

The game is set within the Stockholm city limits, where the virtual MINI Countryman is released.
You’re supposed to find the MINI.
To play you need to download the new iPhone app.
If you get within 50 meters of the car, you’re able to catch it with your iPhone.
Just press the ”take the car-button”, and it’s your’s.

Now you need to escape.
And now’s the time when the real stress begins, when another player comes in your proximity of 5o meters, the bastard can steal the car from you.
If this happens, you’ll have to wait a minute before you can start chasing the son-of-a-bitch that stole what you rightfully have earned.
If you can recapture the car and keep the distance from all the others until the gaming week is ended, you win a real MINI Countryman.

Wow.

This is a brilliant idea.
The goal was to have 5000 people downloading the app.
Over 80 percent did this before the campaign even started!
Not only does the campaign cover many different media platforms,
like pr, social media, live gps-gaming, mobile, it’s also not an ad.
It’s a real event.
Which you can participate in.
The best part: it’s fun!
It lets you be a kid again.
And, come to think of it, isn’t it what we are all longing for?

Are you a stumbler, a madman, or a lover? Read the following piece from my new book on creativity, “The mental orgasm”, and find out.

Creativity is nothing less than a mystery. It’s as profound and complex as life itself. So enigmatic, in fact, that the great artists themselves cannot agree on what it is. Still, the artists seem to fall into eight categories:

The tormented. The courageous. The lovers. The dreamers. The mad. The spiritual. The stumblers. And the juvenile.

The musician and artist David Byrne subscribes to the myth that creativity comes from torment. Actor David Duchovny seems to go along with this. According to David, creativity emanates from anxiety-evoked needs:

The need to get something out. The need to get rid of something. Or to get in touch with something within.

Charles Frankel, the philosopher, explains why. He believes anxiety to be the essential condition of intellectual and artistic creation, and everything that is the finest in human history.

Then we have the curageous.

The inventor of the polariod, Edwin Land have said that an essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail. And Erich Fromm, the famous psychoanalyst, seemed to be of the same conviction by claiming that creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

And then there are those who speak about love as the primary force of creativity.

To fear love is to fear life”, said the great philosopher Bertrand Russel. “And those who fear life are already three part dead”. Not forgetting the finnish philosopher Esa Saarinen, who believed that creativity is the opposite of cynicism – which basically is love and hope. As Igor Stravinsky, the russian composer, suggested: “Love is the driving force behind creativity. Because in order to create”, he said, “there must be a dynamic source, and what source is greater than love?”

Now the dreamers. They feed on hope and courage. They are born optimists and believe in the power of dreams.

Walt Disney, for instance, was a dreamer at heart. He evoked hope in all of us when he proved to the world that if you can dream it, you can do it. But the greatest dreamer of them all must have been JFK. His words at the special joint session of congress 25 May, 1961 is forever ingraved in our memories:

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal – before this decade is out – of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”

Now that’s what I call a dreamer.

Then there are those who gravitate to the obscure and demented.

One is Salvador Dali, the surrealist painter, who nailed the difference between a madman and himself: the madman thinks he is sane, while Dali said he knew he was mad.

George Bernard Shaw, the famous author, is another one. He advised us to fear the reasonable man. Why? Because the reasonable man adapts himself to the world, while the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress, he reckoned, depends upon the unreasonable man. As well as Frank Capra, the film director. He obviously followed his caution, simply by postulating that the more you reason, the less you create.

Of course there is a mystic dimension to creativity as well.

What if the creative potential in human beings is the image of God? At least, that’s how Mary Daly, the philosopher and theologian, pictured it. And Michelangelo, the renaissance artist behind the famous David sculpture in Florens, claimed to have seen the angel in the marble and decided to carve until he set him free. Who else? “Creativity is the act of putting two and two together to make five”,  said Arthur Koestler, the author who wrote about holism – suggesting that everything in the world contains some sort of intentionality, or a direction. Not to mention Albert Einstein, who was convinced that God answers when the solution is simple.

Did I mention the stumblers? They are living proof that mistakes, coincidences and chance (a.k.a serendipity) contribute to breakthrough thinking. More than most people think.

Take John Pemberton, for instance.

He was trying to invent an all purpose syrup that would cure whatever ails people. One gloomy day his assistant happened to spill carbonated water into the brew. Fortunately, they had a hunch about the brownish liquid: better trying before dismissing.

It tasted terrific.

And that was the mistake that eventually brought us Coca-Cola.

Mistakes, coincidences and chance are powerful stuff. That’s how penicillin got invented. And the x-ray. And vulcanized rubber, cellophane, safety glass, Scotchgard, Post-it notes, superglue, the popsicle, tea, cheese, the periodic system, cornflakes and lots of other innovative things.

Finally we have those who regard creativity as no more than an innocent game.

Henri Matisse, the great impressionist painter, regarded creativity as looking at life with the eyes of a child. And the late Leo Burnett, one of the big boys on Madison Avenue (one of the real Mad Men), had a hunch about the secret of creativity:

“Curiosity about life in all of it’s aspects is the secret of great creative people”.

But Ray Bradbury went further. Way further. The famous science fiction writer encouraged us to stop thinking. He believed that thinking is the chief enemy of creativity. Because it’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy.

So what do we learn from this? Does this mean that we all should act as hopelessly childish, passionate, naïve and lion-hearted dreamers that stumbles through life, driven by anxiety and madness?

Yes, why not?

It could be a fun trip.