MORE MONEY THAN BRAINS

 

 

World War One was the first war to feature aircraft.

As it was a new way of making war, the different sides had to figure out how it worked.

For the human mind, the principle is nearly always: More is Better.

Pilots began shooting at each other with pistols, then upgraded to rifles, then eventually machine guns.

By the end of the war, the best fighter planes had two machine guns.

To conventional thinkers, the answer is always more and more, so between the wars the British doubled their firepower, they put FOUR machine guns on their aircraft.

That was a lot of guns, but as new designs appeared conventional thinking said more was better.

So the British decided to put SIX machine guns on their new aircraft, three times the firepower of the earlier planes.

But the British saw the German air force featured the fastest, most modern planes.

The only solution the British knew was for even more guns, so they countered with an unbelievable EIGHT machine guns on their planes.

‘More is better’ was the way the British military mind worked.

But, while the only solution the British could think of was more of the same stuff, the Germans  thought differently.

The Germans fixed a single rapid-firing 20mm cannon on their planes.

The British machine-guns fired a bullet the same size as a rifle, but the German 20mm cannon-shell was much larger, and it was explosive.

On average, it took TWENTY British machine gun bullets to bring down an enemy plane, but it only took THREE German 20mm cannon-shells to bring one down.

So while the British were fixated on more-and-more, the Germans were concentrating on less but more effective.

Eventually, it became obvious the German system was vastly superior, and the British  were forced to scrap the eight machine guns in favour of the more effective cannon.

You think we would have learned the lesson.

But there was a similar divergence of thinking in the battle between the two most powerful battleships: HMS Hood and The Bismark.

British naval doctrine was based around having more firepower, whoever fired more shells, faster must win.

This had been fine for 200 years, when the armaments were cannon-balls fired from a few hundred yards away, but by World War Two the armaments were precision shells, each weighing over a ton, armour-piercing and fired from miles away.

Conventional thinking was that more must always win, The Hood was only concerned with rate-of-fire and so kept all the internal doors to the magazines open, so the guns could be supplied faster, and fire more shells than the enemy.

But a single armour-piercing shell from Bismark hit one of Hood’s turrets and, with all the doors open, the explosion travelled straight to the magazine and The Hood blew up.

One single shell destroyed an entire battleship.

The Hood was a victim of conventional thinking that more and more was always the only answer.

The current thinking in our business is just traditional, conventional thinking: never mind if it’s any good, more is always better.

The people who spend most money on advertising, the biggest conglomerates, have stated publicly that repetition works better than creativity.

They say, instead of worrying about the quality of their advertising, they’re concentrating on running more and more of it.

They say creativity is overrated and constant repetition must win, battering consumers with an ever-increasing quantity.

Why do supposedly trained professional marketing people persist in having no more capacity for thought than ‘Don’t think, just do more of it’?

Every evening my wife (who’s an art director) groans as the same boring ads come on TV in every commercial break, again-and-again-and-again.

And every evening she says the same thing to me: “How come they’ve got so much money to waste?”

And I think that question sums up the current state of conventional advertising thinking.

I think the answer can only be, they’ve got more money than brains.