Where’s Dave Morris now we need him?
Last week I spent four days at D&AD, judging TV and Cinema advertising. Over the whole four days there was one amazing piece of original, creative, thinking that totally blew me away. But it wasn’t any of the adverts.
It was something one of the judges told me. Chris Birch, from Leo Burnett, was telling me about his first day at art school. He’d been taught advertising at Bucks, by Dave Morris.
On the first day, everyone walked into the classroom and sat down. They waited for the advertising lesson to start. Dave Morris walked in and sat at the front of the class. He didn’t mention advertising. He opened up “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu. And he just started reading it aloud.
After about an hour he stopped reading. He said, “Your homework is to think about what you just heard.” How great is that? “The Art of War” was written in China, over two thousand years ago. It was written by a great general, and is still studied at Sandhurst, West Point, and Harvard Business School.
It’s about how to out think an opponent. How to out-manoeuvre them and mainly, at all times, how to take unfair advantage and turn the situation to your benefit. So that you win.
Dave Morris has just demonstrated that, before we start to learn anything about advertising, we’ve got to learn the purpose of advertising. Why we do what we do. Why does anyone pay us to put words next to pictures in the first place?
I’d just spent four days looking at hundreds of films that thought advertising was the end in itself. As if the sole purpose of advertising was to make nice little films. Without ever asking why. Why do we do TV and Cinema commercials? Is the sole purpose to make people laugh?
Or to put lyrical images against charming music tracks for people’s pleasure? Almost everyone who did these films thought the films were the end in themselves.
That’s why I was knocked out to hear how Dave Morris taught advertising. He didn’t start from advertising. He started from the object of advertising. And the object is to win something. To take something from someone else.
To out think someone else. Years before ‘new media’ Dave Morris was telling people to open up their minds. To get upstream of the problem. Instead of kneejerking into the same old traditional solutions. Or kneejerking into new versions of the same old solutions, in ‘new’ media.
Dave Morris taught that we shouldn’t just go on auto pilot. However, uncomfortable it was, we had to use our brain.
We had to come up with a different solution for each problem.
To reinvent the wheel every time, instead of just defaulting to whatever we think advertising should be. Advertising doesn’t start with visuals and headlines. Advertising doesn’t start with digital or online, or TV, or press, or posters, or radio, or ambient, or direct mail, or any of our other disciplines.
Advertising doesn’t even start with advertising. Advertising starts with out-thinking other people. Advertising starts with finding a way to get a result. Against often superior competition. And sometimes the answer may not be advertising at all. Isn’t that a great lesson? To approach the problem out of a question. Not out of an answer.
They should teach Dave Morris’s lesson every year, before each D&AD jury starts to vote.