STUFF FROM THE LOFT - Dave Dye

If you’ve ever wondered how reliant creatives are on their producers, count how many are married to them. Lots. Including me, my two creative partners at Campbell Doyle Dye and dozens of friends.  Psychologists say we seek qualities in a partner we don't have ourselves. To create more complete children. So right brainers, who come up with the theories, need left brainers to help turn them into reality. Yvonne Chalkley has turned more crazy, impossible, can’t-be-done theories into reality than anyone. After watching her ads, you could be forgiven for thinking each came with a blank cheque for production and a guarantee that the creatives had final sign off. Obviously, neither were true. How you navigate between the differing demands from the client, agency, film production company and creative team I don't know. Don’t compromise and the script may not get made. Compromise too much and the script and it may not be worth making. And here’s the really weird, spooky thing - I can’t find anyone who’s ever heard Yvonne raise her voice. Or say no. I asked her to explain. (She said ‘yes’, obvs.) This is the first episode edited by Parv - thanks Parv!  (What were the other guests- chopped liver?)

Imagine a day where you don’t own a computer, and you lose your phone just after breakfast. We used to live like that. Every damn day. With virtually no access to information. Researching how to be better at your job wasn’t a thing. Advertising people didn’t do podcasts or post articles about their work. True, there were books, but not many. Aside from awards annuals, the main two were ‘Ogilvy On Advertising’ and ‘Bill Bernbach’s Book’. Occasionally you’d photocopy an article from Campaign, Creative Review or Direction magazine. Dave Trott’s ‘How To Get Your First Job In Advertising’ was the most useful. I had a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. The text was so faded and broken up it looked like an old religious document. Which it was in a way. It’s still great. (I’ve attached a copy below.) Later, The Copy and Art Direction Books turned up. They were a revelation – good creatives explaining how they create. (If you haven’t read Richard Foster’s piece do, you’ll be a 9% better writer after reading it.) We have the opposite problem today; too much. But it leads to a kind of inertia. A bit like living next to St. Pauls, you put off visiting, because you think ‘it’ll be there tomorrow, next week, next year’. The other problem is who is or isn’t worth listening to? LinkedIn if packed with people aggressively telling you exactly how to create ads as good as the ones they… like. At the other end of the spectrum are people like Dave Trott, George Tannenbaum, Brian Burch, The Behind The Billboard guys, Rory Sutherland, Ben Kay and many more I’ll be embarrassed tomorrow that I forgot to mention. And Steve Hudson. He posts a series called The Power Of Advertising on LinkedIn where he breaks down his (and Victoria Fallon’s) ads from nose to tail. From brief to air. What’s great about it is the work. A lot of teams have a style or preference, Steve (and Victoria) don’t. At least, not that I can spot. What links Audi to Anti-Smoking to One To One to Levi’s to Kingshield other than they’re all great? The weirdest thing about our chat was realising how short their creative career was. 10 years. They took it very seriously, which lead to some great work, but maybe some bad decisions too. Hearing about Steve’s career was a bit like watching a horror film. Instead of shouting ‘LOOK BEHIND YOU!’ I was shouting ‘DON’T RESIGN TO HEGARTY!’ or ‘STAY AT ABBOTT MEAD!’. Anyway, it was a great chat, hope you enjoy it.

Creating is different to managing. Creators try to break rules, managers set them. Creators look inward, managers look outward. Creators are introverts, managers are extroverts. Not 100%, but most, AMV/BBDO once Myers Briggs tested their creative department. The results came back - fifty people were rated ‘I’ (introvert), one was ‘E’ - the creative boss (Peter Souter). I’s are ‘more likely to be successful in careers like writing, science and art’. Makes sense. “I’s are predominantly concerned with their own thoughts and feelings rather than with external things. Give an extrovert a problem and they’ll share it with others, give it to an introvert and they’ll ‘go into a cave alone to solve it’. (Try finding a cave these days. In Soho. Nightmare.) Today, creatives are often described as being “on the spectrum”. Whether their diagnosis is right or wrong, it's true, our brains are wired differently. It's fine when they need someone to look at a problem from a new angle. More difficult when they need someone to play the role of manager. That dark, cosy cave is swapped for bright, stranger-filled boardrooms. Primarily to pitch, possibly the furthest distance from that cave. You may be told to ‘have chemistry’ with six strangers from the world of moist wipes. Or to present your funniest ‘jokes’ to some folks about to spend £6m persuading the public that their product has isn’t a cake, as its name suggests, it’s actually a biscuit. It’s an adjustment. Some adapt quicker than others. I found it tough. In the early days of CDD, clients having just left after a pitch, Peter Mead looked up at me and sighed “You should’ve seen David Abbott present creative work”. Heartbreaking. What did Abbott do? How did he present? I’d love to have seen him present creative work. But agencies rarely invest in training or mentoring, they lob you in and hope you can swim. It's like telling a footballer to “Put this helmet and shin pads on, you’re now a Cricketer’. How do you make that transition less record scratchy? I thought it’d be helpful for those about to go through it to have a bit more understanding of where they're headed. To do this, I managed to pin down someone who knows more about pitching than anyone else; Martin Jones. He’s sat on both sides of the table - he ran new business at the biggest agency in Britain at the time; J. Walter Thompson, then ran the biggest intermediary in the Country for the last thirty years; The AAR. Personally, he's run over a thousand over the last thirty years. It’s meant that he’s seen every agency and senior person pitch. I’ve known Martin since Arsenal’s Invincibles team, over the years he’s given me endless advice, but hearing him talk about his experience was a revelation. If you have anything to do with new business; listen, you’ll be better at the end. Hope you enjoy it.

Whatever happened to funny ads? Have clients stopped buying them? Or have agencies stopped writing them? They used to dominate the ad breaks. Humour was the first tool you reached for after being handed a brief. Why? Well, as that Poppins women says ‘A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down’. Actually…did they dominate ad breaks? Maybe I’ve slipped on my rose-tinted specs again? I reach for an old D&AD Annual. Randomly, I pick up 1991’s. 34 tv and cinema ads featured; 28 were funny. Of the 28, the most awarded were for Barclaycard and Red Rock Cider. They feel slightly odd today. They aren’t ‘advertising funny’, they’re actually funny. In a way that I can’t imagine them popping up between Bake Off? I don’t know whether it’s because they don’t take the product very seriously? Some even make fun of it. (Imagine; making fun of the very people who pay the bills?) Or maybe getting bigger laughs than the programmes that surround you feels like bad form? Like you have aspirations above your station. I decided to do a bit of rudimentary desk research, discovering that humour is still surprisingly popular. The public love it, apparently. Much preferring it to being lectured to or bullshitted. So why the lack of funny ads? Even ad testing companies are urging us to produce more. (Yes System 1, I’m talking about you.) In an effort to better understand this humour thing, I went straight to the Chairman of the Board, the Grand Fromage, the Capo di Tutti Frutti – John Lloyd. Not only did he shoot both the campaigns above, he’d spent two decades beforehand producing the funniest stuff on tv, including Not The Nine O’clock News, Blackadder and Spitting Image. We had a lovely chat, hope you enjoy it.

“A lot of people on your podcast became creatives by accident.” Someone messaged me this last week (after listening to four of them back-to-back). I got me thinking; why do creatives become creatives? I’d divide them into two groups. The Lifestyle Brigade™ - attracted by the trappings. (Nothing wrong with that - it’s why most people go to work.) And the Expressionists™ - attracted by putting a bit of themselves out into the world. A point of view, an observation, a joke, whatever. Like 90% of creatives, they're likely to be introverts. Advertising, for them, is the conduit to a wider audience. It's not like creating a widget in an ad factory, it’s much more personal. Their work reflects the values they live by. They don't find it helpful to patronise, bullshit or lie when talking to people day to day, so they don't do it talking to people via pixels or ink. Dealing with humans on a regular basis, they've found logic, facts, humour and honesty persuade harder. So these are the tools the reach for most often. Nick Cohen is one of the best examples of the Expressionists™. It's hard to think of anyone who’s leaned harder into the ‘honest’ tool. Nick has just written an excellent book about his fabulous experiment - Mad Dogs and Englishmen. It's a joy. It made me want to get into advertising all over again. We had a great chat about the book, the agency and honesty in advertising. Hope you enjoy it.