Someone I know just sent me a really interesting email.
Hi Dave,
I’m doing a “what’s my brand” workshop at NABS, and they’ve asked me to get an external opinion of where I am and what I need to work on.
Please answer the following questions honestly:
1) What are my key strengths and skills?
2) If asked for an opinion on me what would people say?
3) What would you say?
4) Do I have a point of difference/unique selling point?
5) If I was a popular brand what would I be and why?
6) What do you think I could build more on to help define who I am?
I thought that was great, I’d never heard of anything like that before.
Have you ever noticed how people who work in advertising don’t use their advertising skills on themselves?
Copywriters, art directors, account men, planners, marketing experts?
People who spend all day, every day, advising clients on advertising.
People who are experts in building brands.
But they don’t use advertising thinking to build their own brand.
Why is this?
I think it’s what John Webster used to call ‘mimophants’.
The mimosa is the most delicate plant there is, its leaves curl up at the slightest touch.
The elephant is the biggest, clumsiest creature there is.
Put them together you get the ‘mimophant’.
An elephant with other people’s feelings and a mimosa with its own.
Which is why we are all much better at advising other people what to do than we are at taking our own advice.
We can be rational about other people because we are not emotionally involved.
But we are emotionally involved in ourselves and it stops us being able to think and act rationally.
We can be objective about other people, but we remain subjective about ourselves.
It’s easy to act when we’re objective, because we’re logical.
But it’s tough to act when we’re subjective because we’re emotional.
So the best thing is learn to become disentangled with ourselves, to be able to step outside ourselves.
To look at ourselves from the outside.
To treat ourselves like a product.
Rory Sutherland said a very perceptive thing.
“Creative people have a fear of the obvious, yet they must sell their work to people who have a love of the obvious”.
This is because, in a work situation, the creatives are rational and the client is emotional.
The brand they are talking about is the client’s entire job, it’s 100% of their work and income.
But to the creatives it’s one of many brands or products they work on.
It doesn’t consume them the way it consumes the client.
But when it comes to advertising themselves it’s a different story.
Then it is something that consumes them 100%.
Then they are subjective, emotionally involved.
Which is why most advertising people don’t use advertising thinking on themselves.
They curl up with embarrassment at the thought of it.
But if you’re an expert in building brands, it’s a simple question.
Can you walk the talk?
Dave, would you say there’s a very thin line between the obvious (could lead to genius) and the predictable (usually leads to boring)? Thanks. The mimosa is so sensitive the leaves furl up if you so much as blow at it – do’t even need to touch it.
Robin, you need to expand the question a bit for me, I’m not clear
“If you can’t advertise yourself, what hope have you of being able to advertise anything else?”
I thought this was the second most famous quote in advertising, right after Wanamaker. Looks like it’s easy to forget.
Dave,
Don’t you think we’d all be better off with a combat correspondent writing up our thing whilst we’re all under fire?
I’m not sure we are best placed to talk about ourselves.
John, see Adam’s quote above.
That’s what I was taught in New York, that’s how they think about advertising there.
It isn’t a place for shy retiring ‘artists’
Dave,
i totally agree but sometimes the emptiest vessels make the loudest noises.
I always automatically assume we’re talking about good people.
Which means they’ll do it better, cheaper, quicker, more stylishly than noticeably, less irritatingly than ’empty vessels’
Dave,
This is true but I think that falls into the exceptional category.
After all, good is the enemy of great.
Obvious vs predictable. Sometimes, we see a commercial or an idea. And not many people are that impressed. Maybe because the idea’s obvious – but sort of an elusive obvious. As in, it wasn’t the first idea that came to mind. I guess what I’m saying is obvious answers still require hard work, to filter out those that don’t work. To paraphrase, ‘once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, must be the answer’. Whereas predictable is taking the first thing that comes to mind. Thank you.
Robin, anyone who’s any good would prefer to judge the quality of the idea rather than how difficult it was to come up with.
The punters won’t know how difficult it was to come up with and they’re more important than the creative director or the client
Dave, would you say that most punters prefer complex ideas to simple ideas? Thank you.
Yup
Sorry I meant yup to simple not complex