Let’s count everything

This is a great chapter from Dave Trott’s book: Predatory Thinking

Never mind the quality, feel the width

My first job in advertising in London was at BMP in Paddington.

We had a lovely old delivery-van driver called George.

George was a little, tubby, bald cockney with a gravelly voice.

He was always wheeling and dealing, always had slightly dodgy merchandise to sell.

One day George came round the creative department looking for me.

He said, ‘’Ere, Dave, you like books, don’t cha?’

I said I did.

He said, ‘I’ve got some big books in the van, d’you wanna buy ’em?’

I said it depended who they were by.

George said, ‘I don’t know nuffink abaht that. But they’re three or four inches thick, abaht a foot wide, and two foot long. They ain’t half big. D’you wanna buy ’em?’

At the time it seemed odd to me.

Did George really think size was the first consideration in buying a book?

Did he imagine bookshops were divided into two sections?

‘Big Books’ and ‘Little Books’.

If you like books a lot you go in the ‘Big Books’ section.

If you don’t like books much you go in the ‘Little Books’ section.

That seems silly to us.

But hang on.

If it’s so silly, how come we do our jobs that way then?

When I talk to people from different ad agencies all over London, they’re constantly filling in timesheets.

To work out how long they spent on a particular job. Not how good or bad the work was, you notice.

Just how long they spent.

Agencies work out how much of their staff’s time the client can afford.

Then allocate people accordingly.

I hear it all over town.

‘We can’t afford a senior planner on this, we can only afford a junior.’

‘The art director can only have half a day on this, we’re already over budget.’

‘The copywriter can’t rewrite the copy, we’ve spent all the hours.’

And the bookkeeping takes over.

Is that mad or what?

Einstein said, ‘Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.’

But we haven’t remembered that.

Quite the opposite.

Counting has taken over from what counts.

And we’ve forgotten the first rule of advertising.

It doesn’t matter what went into it.

What matters is what people get out of it.

Imagine if we judged everything else this way.

Films:

‘No, I don’t want to see that film, it’s only 97 minutes long.

This one is 122 minutes long, that’s a much better film.’

Restaurants:

‘Waiter, can I see a menu with information next to each dish about how long it took the farmer to grow the vegetables, and what the chef’s hourly rate is?’

Art:

‘I don’t want to go to the Louvre, the Mona Lisa is only 18 inches square. They’ve got much bigger paintings hanging on the railings outside Hyde Park, let’s go there.’

If we’re looking for a way to judge value for money, we’re using the wrong criteria.

In any other area of life we judge on quality.

How good something is.

It seems in advertising now we can only judge on quantity.

How much do we get?

We’re doing our jobs the way George sold books.