Trumpy McTrumpface

Recently the democratic process has been rigorously tested and failed severely on both sides of the Atlantic. Worse it has shown what cynics have suspected all along: a game that is rigged long before play begins.

In the USA the nomination process may not be the greatest show on earth but it is surely The Longest Show on Earth.

The process has always been arcane.

There are primaries, delegates, super delegates, PACs, Super PACs and other stuff they love talking about on CNN.

Surely the whole shebang could conceivably be decided online, in a two week period, prior to a party’s convention?

Apparently not, and the current Republican nomination process has shown not only is it arcane, it’s antiquated beyond belief and open to scurrilous manipulation.

Whether or not you’re a fan of the Trumpster, surely any fair-minded person would have to admit that ganging up to stop the guy with the most votes is hardly democratic behaviour.

Even if the regulations allow such shabby goings on, surely the whole point of democracy is that it manifests the will of the people, and not just the people with strings to pull.

Alas, tragically even the green and pleasant land of Magna Carta is not immune from such sleazy shenanigans.

The UK’s Natural Environment Research Council asked members of the public to vote on a name for their new polar research ship.

The winning name attracted 124,109 votes, four times as many as the runner up.

It was: Boaty McBoatface.

However in another blatant slap in the face for democracy the vessel will be christened the RRS Sir David Attenborough in honour of the environmentalist.

Despite his name polling just 10,284 votes and coming fifth.

The science minister Jo Johnson, excused the volte-face by explaining the poll was only for suggestions.

I have not read the small print but I repeat, even if the regulations permit such shabby behaviour, surely the whole point of democracy is that it manifests the will of the people and not just the people with strings to pull.

As a sop to the people with no strings to pull, the remote sub the ship carries will be given the name of Boaty McBoatface.

I can’t help thinking this somehow makes things worse and culture minister Ed Vaizey agrees, saying the decision should “respect the will of the people”.

At any rate the whole messy stunt is now the subject of a Parliamentary Inquiry in another fine democratic tradition, namely throwing good money after bad.

Choosing a name for a ship may seem trivial in comparison to choosing the possible leader of the free world.

But isn’t that the point, democracy doesn’t make distinctions.

It’s a principle that’s built around the numbers.

And only the numbers.

It’s as simple as that.

The Spaces in Between

  A mate started a gig at a company that bigs itself up as innovative.

After he’d been there a few weeks, I asked him what he thought and he said, “I think they confuse innovation with novelty.”

For some reason his answer came to mind after the death of Johan Cruyff.

Cruyff was a football genius who died last week following a battle with cancer.

One of the first and probably the best exponent of total football.

Circa 1970, total football was revolutionary because it treated space as an element that’s just as important as the ball.

As a player and later a manager, Cruyff thought about football almost in terms of design thinking.

Today every team tries to create space when they have the ball and close it down when the opposition has it.

At the 1974 World Cup, Holland was playing Sweden.

In the 23^rd minute Cruyff, was one-on-one with Swedish defender Jan Olsson.

Feinting to pass, he gently touched the ball behind his own standing leg, swivelled 180 degrees and accelerated in a blur of orange.

A collective gasp swept around the stadium as Olsson flailed backwards into a space, which surely hadn’t existed a moment ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1k7DGqRF5g&rel=0

The move was more like a magician’s trick and the crowd was stunned.

It was promptly christened the Cruyff Turn.

And swiftly became mandatory for any aspiring top-flight footballer.

You could say it marked the beginning of modern football.

Just as surely as DDB’s Think Small ad, marked the beginning of modern advertising.

Helmut Krone famously devoted 80% of the page to white space and the result was equally simple and brilliant.

Both Cruyff and Krone saw where others couldn’t see, they worked in the spaces in between.

As Bill Bernbach said, “Creating advertising is very simple but creating simple advertising is the hardest thing there is.”

Actually Bernbach never said that.

Cruyff said it, but about football, “Playing football is very simple but playing simple football is the hardest thing there is.”

It probably fooled you because it feels like something Bernbach would have said.

And one thing he most definitely did say was, “Good advertising builds sales. Great advertising builds factories.”

Which is echoed by Pep Guardiola’s comment referring to Barcelona’s Camp Nou stadium, “Cruyff built the cathedral; our job is to maintain and renovate it.”

There was advertising pre-and-post Think Small.

There was football pre-and-post the Cruyff Turn.

Nothing would—or could, be the same again.

You couldn’t confuse either with novelty.

The C-Word

A woman shouts, ‘’Fire!’’ in a crowded theatre. The audience stampedes for the exits and in the ensuing panic two people are crushed to death.

The theatre burns to the ground and the woman is acclaimed as a hero.

A woman shouts, ‘’Fire!’’ in a crowded theatre.

The audience stampedes for the exits and in the ensuing panic two people are crushed to death.

There is no fire and the woman goes to prison.

The message is the same in both cases.

Only the context is different.

So clearly context is every bit as important as content when it comes to delivering a message.

They're really two sides of the same coin.

Given that the effectiveness of one is inextricably tied to the other, I find this next statistic odd.

Google “content marketing” and you get 19,400,000 hits.

Google “context marketing” and you get 37,900.

Does this huge disparity help explain the repetitious drivel, inane listicles and dull platitudes that make up so much of what passes for content?

It's hard to believe there's no connection, data usually means something.

What I Have in Common With a Legend

I don’t wear tweed suits or smoke a pipe. And my real estate holdings may not run to a chateau in the South of France.

But I still have one important thing in common with David Ogilvy.

We both worked in sales before we worked in advertising.

At fifteen I worked Saturdays at the local department store selling bedding.

Before university I spent a year selling wine at a 300 year old London wine merchant.

These two jobs taught me basic sales techniques.

How you never lead with a closed question.

(I’m amazed how many retail salespeople still get this wrong.)

It’s never, “Can I help you?”

It’s always, “How can I help you?”

The first question can be answered with a No!

And if you don’t want to hear No!—don’t make it easy for prospects to say it!

The more open-ended your questions, the more you find out what’s on a prospect’s mind.

That’s how you get inside their head.

And once you’ve poked around in there and made some sort of connection, you ask the obligation question.

If I throw in a sheet set with this deluxe mattress you like, would you buy it today?

After university I talked my way into Advertising.

And what I’d learnt in sales was useful in a couple of ways.

First, I was comfortable presenting, internally or to clients, and I could usually sell the work I wanted to sell.

Second, because I’d spent a few years selling to different people, I could empathize with them.

Selling to people face to face is much easier than selling to people you never meet.

Selling to people you’ve never met is akin to a thought experiment.

And I had a better idea how to think my way into the head of a mum with 2 kids, or a 19 year old bloke going out with his mates or whoever the target was.

I had a better idea of what they would respond to, because I had a better idea of who they were.

Einstein used thought experiments to understand the universe.

A famous one had him imagining a man floating in a box in zero gravity.

I never fully understood it.

But there was one I could understand and I used it to write ads.

I’d imagine the target in a shop so I could talk with them one-on-one.

And I could usually visualize this quite well because I’d spent a lot of time talking with prospects in shops.

John E Kennedy, another advertising legend described advertising as, “salesmanship in print.”

How exactly do you write that if you’ve never really sold anything?

It’s hard enough when you have.

Blank is Dead!

Pundits love death. They’re forever proclaiming the death of this or that.

It’s dramatic and authoritative.

So over the last decade we’ve been told:

Newspapers are dead.

Books are dead.

TV is dead.

Advertising is dead.

Of course all these industries have undergone radical change over the last 10 years, but name an industry that hasn’t.

And radical change is far from death but nowhere near as dramatic.

Newspapers generated an estimated $179 billion in circulation and advertising revenue in 2014, according to the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. That’s bigger than the film or music industry. Yes, many papers have closed or consolidated but a $179 billion death? Bring it on!

Book sales in the UK totalled 245 million in 2014 (up from 237 million back in 2008). True, 63 million of these were e-books, but there are still 2,500 bookshops serving the country. Furthermore e-book sales appear to have plateaued. Makes sense to me. Who wants to spend more time looking at a screen?

TV may get beat up the most of these examples. Mobile video is eating its lunch in spite of being dogged by scandal. Netflix is eating its dinner but it’s not a horrible dinner guest because it’s also paying the networks millions for rights to shows.

With everyone taking their bite you’ll probably be surprised to hear TV revenues are still growing to $71.1 billion this year and $81 billion projected in 2019. TV may be a mess but reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.

Global Advertising revenues increased from $438 billion in 2009 to $611 billion in 2015. That’s a tad under a 40% increase in 6 years. Yes, much of the spending is going into digital and lots of traditional agencies got caught out but if this is death, bring it on!

It’s not what Keats had in mind, but the line fits: “Now more than ever seems it rich to die!*”

I imagine there were people around 1950 watching the ascendancy of television convinced that radio was dead.

Which will come as news to Howard Stern who just signed a new 5-year contract with Sirius XM worth a rumoured $400 million plus.

And many people have proclaimed the death of the buggy-whip industry, which has long been used as an example of failure to adapt to a changing marketplace.

But guess what, if you need a buggy whip you can still buy one!

From which we can surmise that while the industry may have been in a coma it cheated death.

And if the buggy whip industry still has a handhold, however tenuous, it would seem very few industries die completely.

Not that you'd know it from the Blank is Dead brigade.

It’s not the hyperbole I object to, it’s the lazy bandwagonism masquerading as thought leadership.

Guess there really is a sucker born every minute.

It’s the circle of life!

* I added the exclamation...

American Sports Fans are Missing out Bigtime!

The richest game in sports pays the winner a staggering $180 million. It’s played every year on a Saturday in May, and is often contested by teams most people outside the UK haven’t heard of.

Last May was Middlesbrough versus Norwich.

Norwich won, securing the remaining promotion spot to English Premier League, aka the Prem, and a big payday thanks largely to the $2.2 billion annual TV rights.

Losers Middlesbrough remain in the second tier Championship. (Roughly comparable to triple A)

(The top two Championship clubs win automatic promotion, with the next four clubs going into the playoffs.)

What goes up also comes down, with the bottom 3 clubs in the Prem, suffering the ignominy of relegation to the Championship.

Often the relegation dogfights are more gripping than the battle for first place as the three clubs in the relegation zone feel the tension building as their remaining games and hopes dwindle.

And this upheaval happens every season, consistently bad performances are met with dire consequences for both clubs and players.

Outside the largest clubs, many player contracts contain relegation clauses that trigger a wage cut if the club gets relegated, so it’s not just pride that gets hurt.

So great are the financial rewards of being in the Prem that clubs who do get relegated, are given parachute payments of around $90 million over 4 years to help balance their books.

And they need it, the step up is extreme and 50% of promoted clubs get relegated their very first season.

America celebrates winners in all walks of life so it’s a little ironic that losing sports teams get a free pass.

In a country that’s a beacon of democracy, the major leagues operate as a closed shop where the only way in is buying a franchise.

Somehow it doesn’t feel very sporting, but of course pro-sports is big business.

Most brands can only dream about the brand loyalty sports teams enjoy and the valuations prove it.

According to Forbes the average NFL team is worth $2 billion, up a massive 38% since 2014.

The average MLB team clocks in at $1.2 billion and is up an even more massive 48% year over year according to the same source.

With that kind of return there’s no incentive for change, hence teams like the notorious 2008 Detroit Lions who lost every game but stayed in the NFL.

Promotion and relegation does fans a huge favour because the system keeps owners honest.

Imagine the Loser Bowl a play-off between the NFL’s worst two teams with the loser vanquished to a second tier league.

And the winner of that second tier league bringing flesh blood to the NFL.

Of course, it will never happen, but it would give under-performing owners and athletes a little added motivation.

And fans are missing out on some serious fun.

Apart from the small but growing number, watching the Prem on NBC.

Michelangelo and the Art of the Deal

When Michelangelo carved his statue of David, everyone proclaimed the young man a genius—especially the artist himself. Well almost everyone, Pier Soderini who had commissioned the piece, had a concern.

He thought the nose was a little broad at its base.

So Michelangelo took a hammer and chisel and climbed back up the scaffold.

He also palmed a handful of marble dust.

While he tapped the hammer against the chisel, he let the marble dust fall to the ground.

He didn’t change the nose at all but his client was none the wiser.

We know this from not one, but two contemporary biographies.

One by Giorgio Vasari published in 1550.

And another by Ascanio Condivi published in 1553.

Michelangelo wasn’t taking any chances, Vasari’s original was a little too objective for his taste.

He knew being a genius was no guarantee of success.

In fact it could work against you, because you were doing things that hadn’t been done before, things outside most people’s frame of reference.

He understood art was a business and patrons needed to be reassured that they were investing wisely.

So he encouraged Condivi to write the second and worked very closely with the author.

Condivi was a former pupil of his and most art historians agree Michelangelo virtually dictated it.

The text verges on hagiography, but no matter.

One biography meant you were important.

Two biographies proclaimed you as the greatest artist living, nicknamed Il Divino.

The Divine One – that’s brilliant branding.

Picture yourself as Renaissance nobility, looking for something nice for the palazzo.

Would you rather buy from Luigi the sculptor, or the Divine One?

Not surprisingly the commissions rolled in and people felt good parting with their money.

At least most people did, but there were exceptions.

Angelo Doni wanted a painting to commemorate his marriage.

He protested Michelangelo’s price of 70 ducats was a little high.

So the artist doubled it on the spot.

Presumably Doni anted up, because the Doni Madonna hangs in the Uffizi Gallery today.

Picasso was a fan of this pricing strategy; he gleefully and repeatedly used the same ploy on hesitant collectors.

Michelangelo was a devout man who spent his life creating art for the glory of God.

But he understood that the art of the deal went hand-in-hand with the art.

And his attitude towards the business of art was surprisingly avant garde.

He saw there was a difference between what people buy, and what they think they’re buying.

And he knew how to leverage it.

Stop Sitting on It

We needed a new couch. So we bought a really gorgeous one.

Everybody loved it.

It was big, deep and comfortable.

And it was not inexpensive.

A while later we moved.

In our new place, the couch was too big to fit where we wanted it to.

So we put it where it would fit.

But it just didn’t feel right.

It dominated the room.

I don’t know for sure, but I imagine a Feng Shui master would have been horrified.

I do know anyone rarely sat on it, even though it was the same gorgeous, deep and comfortable couch.

But what could we do?

There was nowhere else to put it.

If we posted it on Craigslist, we’d get a fraction of what it cost.

And it had been used so little it was almost brand new.

So the couch stayed where it was.

And people rarely sat on it.

And a year passed, until one day we realized.

The couch that nobody sat on had become a room that nobody used.

A room we paid the mortgage on, heated and paid taxes for.

And it was completely useless.

So we gave the big ugly couch away.

And built some bookshelves in the space where it had been.

And put a comfortable chair next to the bookshelves.

Now it’s a different room.

People sit in the comfortable chair and read.

When we thought about how long it had taken us to figure this out, we laughed.

We saw the couch every day.

Eventually we didn’t notice it any more.

It had always been there.

It was the way we had always done things.

Even when it didn’t work.

To rearrange the furniture takes a bit of effort.

It takes a lot more effort to re-order intangible elements.

Like the elements that shape our lives and businesses.

And often the hardest part is identifying them.