In the Bond movie ‘Casino Royale’ you learn the secret of winning at poker.
You have to spot your opponent’s ‘tell’.
The ‘tell’ is their reaction to seeing their cards and knowing they’ve got a winning hand.
In the movie, Bond spots his opponent’s ‘tell’, which is scratching his eyelid.
This allows Bond to fold his cards and only bet when he knows he has a better hand.
It’s a definite advantage, the only problem is it isn’t true.
I heard a professional poker player being interviewed on the radio.
Over the course of her career she’d won many millions of dollars.
She was asked if the secret of her success was learning to spot her opponent’s ‘tell’.
She said no, that was for amateurs (and this is the brilliant part).
She said all a ‘tell’ could reveal was what the other player thought about their cards, not the truth.
She said, early in her career she’d been playing a hand against an opponent for a quarter of a million dollars.
She’d learned to read his ‘tell’.
She could see he thought he had a great hand, and she knew she didn’t, so she folded.
When the cards were revealed he didn’t actually have a great hand at all, her cards could have beaten his easily.
But he thought he had a great hand, and that made the difference, she had folded to his opinion, not the facts.
He had read the cards completely wrongly so he thought he had a great hand.
That was the last time she ever placed any faith in the ‘tell’ because it was just someone else’s opinion.
From then on she always relied on the facts, on what she actually knew.
She’d learned that other people’s opinions are just that: opinions not facts.
We do too much of that in our business, trying to second-guess what other people will think.
Planners telling us we can’t do something because they don’t think the consumers will get it.
Account men telling us we can’t do something because they don’t think the client will like it.
Clients telling us we can’t do something because they don’t think it’s what people will expect from their market sector.
Everyone is trying to second-guess what someone else might think.
Ages ago, John Hegarty was telling me how they launched the campaign that turned Audi’s image around.
At that time, people didn’t know Audi was German, they thought it was Scandinavian.
But research showed that German cars had a great reputation for engineering, car buyers were willing to pay more for German cars like Mercedes, BMW, Porsche, or VW.
So the purpose of advertising should be to let everyone know Audi were German.
Which is why John and Barbara Nokes wrote the campaign: “Audi – ‘Vorsprung Durch Technic’, as they say in Germany”.
But research was worried that older people remembered the war and might not like advertising in German being broadcast on British TV.
Then the client, John Mezzaros, said “But you told me the purpose of the advertising was to make people aware that Audi was German, does this advertising do that?”
The agency said yes, it does.
The client said “Well that’s the job it’s supposed to do, so run it.”
Thanks to that client they ran that campaign, the advertising passed into the language, and Audi began selling a lot more cars for a lot more money.
All because the client wasn’t trying to second-guess what anyone else would think.
He wasn’t using advertising to try to win a popularity contest.
He was using advertising to solve a business problem.
Love this. Thank you