Dave Trott Quotes

Our whole world is advertising, so we think everyone’s whole world is advertising. That’s why so many of us are so bad at it. We don’t think it’s our job to talk to people outside advertising. We think it’s their job to pay attention to us.

And Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? went on to pull in bigger audiences than EastEnders. And it only happened because Paul Smith stopped expecting his client to understand his idea rationally, and got his client to feel it. Because that’s where the sell happens. Paul Smith moved the sell from what Kahneman calls System Two thinking (the slow, rational mind) to System One thinking (the fast, emotional mind). As in any sell, desire must precede permission

As the economist J.M. Keynes said: “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas, as in escaping from the old ones.

Orson Welles summed it up best in The Third Man. ‘In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

According to the laws of aerodynamics the bumblebee can’t fly. But the bumblebee doesn’t know that, so it just carries on flying around.

She said, ‘Standard El Al procedure. If you check the passengers’ luggage, you have to fly on the plane.’ How about that? The person who inspects the passengers’ luggage for bombs has to bet their life on how well they do their job.

As the philosopher Bertrand Russell said, ‘The problem with the world is that the ignorant are arrogant and cocksure, while the intelligent are full of doubt.’ Because thinking is more difficult once we realise there is no right or wrong. Just the same thing viewed from different perspectives.

The product creates the experience. The experience creates the reputation. The reputation creates the brand.

Don’t try to force or nag people into doing what you want. Accept that they are free to choose. But you help them choose what you want.

We don’t keep competing inside a competitive set where we can’t win. We change the competitive set, change the perspective.

The more varied the input, the more unexpected the combinations, the more creative the ideas.

It’s a classic advertising problem. How do you take something very complicated and reduce it to something very simple, while still retaining the core truth?