COMMON SENSE v MARKETING

 

 

My art director, Gordon Smith, once told me his son, Louis, liked to play online gambling.

But he said Louis only went online late at night, I asked him why that was.

He said Louis told him most of the people online were drunk by that time, so all their judgement has gone, and because they are drunk they are over-confident and make stupid bets, so it’s easier for Louis to win.

It was just common-sense.

There’s probably a marketing jargon name for that, but Louis doesn’t know or care, he just takes the money.

It reminded me of something Jerry Della Femina told me.

When he was young he liked to bet at the race-track, but only on the last race.

I asked him why that was.

He said in most races the favourite usually wins (that’s why it’s the favourite) so early on most people bet on it.

But because most people bet on it the odds are very low, you can’t make much money.

But by the last race, all the people who’ve lost money are desperate to win their money back.

So hardly anyone bets on the favourite they all put their money on the long shots.

Which means the odds on the favourite go way up because no one’s betting on it.

By waiting until the last race, Jerry got much better odds on the favourite, up to twice as good as he’d get in the earlier races.

I’m sure there’s a marketing jargon name for that, but Jerry Della Femina didn’t know or care, he just took the money.

I notice a lot of what’s called marketing jargon is just common-sense dressed up in technical-sounding names.

In advertising it seems everyone wants to use complicated language rather than common sense.

They think knowing complicated language gives them credibility.

It reminds me of a story Richard Feynman tells about when he was a little boy.

“In a field one day, one kid said to me, “See that bird? What’s the name of that bird?” I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea.” He said, “It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you anything.”

But it was the opposite. My dad already taught me: “See that bird?” he said. “It’s a Spencer’s Warbler.  In Italian, it’s a Chutto Lapittida.  In Portuguese, it’s Bom de Peida.  In Chinese, it’s Chung-long-tah.  In Japanese, it’s Katano Tekeda.

Now you can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you still know absolutely nothing about the bird. You’ll only know what humans in different places call the bird.

Now let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing – that’s what counts.”

And so I learned very early from my father the difference between knowing the name of something and actually knowing something.”

Over the years, I’ve had some really creative, exciting briefs, and none of them came dressed up in fancy language.

They were all the result of simple, common-sense, thinking, so they didn’t need jargon.

Poor thinkers like long complicated words because it sounds like intelligent thinking.

But it’s actually only a disguise, to camouflage their inability to think creatively.

Really great thinking is very simple, and that takes brains.

Because you have to go through complicated to get to simple.

As Oliver Wendell-Holmes said:

“I wouldn’t give a fig for the simplicity that comes before complicated thinking.

But for the simplicity that comes after complicated thinking, for that I’d give my life.”