John Hegarty on advertising (and what Nelson Mandela might say)

John Hegarty has been behind some of the most memorable adverts of the past 20 years. Such as this. He’s the author of the memoir “Hegarty on Advertising”, widely regarded as one of the finest books on the subject. In a series of posts, I will reflect on some of his ideas and use them as a backbone for some personal thoughts on advertising.

The first quote that sticks out from the book is this:

“Creativity in advertising is all about the power of reduction. Write less, say more.”

Most people would agree that this seems a core principle of the craft. Brevity is not just the soul of wit, but also of good copy. Consoling poetry, stirring song lyrics, funny jokes, and great copy are similar in one key respect: the biggest amount of impact is crammed into the smallest number of words. Examples of this abound in culture, for example:

In the sentence “1984 is not going to be like 1984”, from their 1984 Superbowl advert, Apple said everything they needed to say about why Macintosh computers were better than IBM (their main rival at the time). These were computers for the people, the future is in our hands. Individual expression will be victorious over autocratic uniformity.

When, in Kerouac’s classic novel “On The Road”, the narrator, Sal, remarks: “The road is life”, in four short words he offers an answer to universal existential angst. Meaning is found in the journey, not at some destination at the end of the road. The journey is the destination. Life is the little moments that we thrive or despair in, amidst a sea of nothingness and contingency. Life is a frothing, violent sea that you must dive into: we should leap naively into the moment for that is all there is, but that is enough. This was a rebellion against the creeping conformity of 1950s America: where happiness or meaning was to be up found at the top of a hill somewhere, whether that hill be made of money or God. “The road is life”: a world of subtext lives in those 4 words.

We all have our favourite song lyrics, lyrics that sum up a kaleidoscope of emotion in an abrupt flourish. “Slow Show” by The National for me sums up what it is like to be in love “You know I dreamed about you for 29 years before I saw, I missed you for 29 years”. And “Sorrow” sums up what it’s like to be dumped: “Sorrows my body on the waves, sorrows a girl inside my cage, I live in a city sorrow built, it’s in my honey it’s in my milk”.

But back to Hegarty. He writes: “The function of an object is now taken for granted, so our concern shifts from function to form”. Here he is referring to design and usability. As consumers we want something that looks fantastic and something that is easy to use. These are the extra gifts in the box that make Apple products, for example, stand-out above all their rivals. What does “the extra gifts in the box” mean? Well, it’s a phrase coined by marketer Seth Godin and is best illustrated with an example: the iPhone isn’t just a good phone (there are lots of good phones around), but it also looks great, is very light, is intuitively simple to use, and is packed full of great apps. It is full of little gifts to the consumer beyond being a phone, and those extras are what make it stand-out. The phone bit is almost irrelevant. Apple obsesses over usability and design, and their advertising demonstrates and celebrates their comparative advantage brilliantly. Here's an example. 

Apple’s products are so exceptional, so innovative, so stand-out, that the marketing is built in. Hence the simplicity of their advertising: make the product the star, and just demonstrate how easy it is to use, and how the technology is relevant to people’s lives. Like this advert for the iPad: essentially just a series of simple vignettes about how it helps someone live a full, and exciting life.

One of the biggest themes of Hegarty’s book is the importance of RELEVANCE. Advertising should reflect how people actually think, talk and live. Intrinsic to an advert must be a sense of humanity: it must be personal, it must reflect human values, worries, fears, needs, aspirations.

As advertisers we seek to tell stories as efficiently and compellingly as possible as to how the product is relevant to the consumer. Here is a wonderfully simply advert for the iPhone 5.  The take-out: there is a brilliant camera on the iPhone, and it has a great feature that helps you with your family life. The technology is not redundant, it is essential and useful.

This focus on relevance reminds me of a quote from Bill Bernbach in “Ogilvy On Advertising”:

“Shortly before he died, Bill was asked what changes he expected in advertising in the 80s. He replied, “Human nature hasn’t changed for a billion years. It won’t even vary in the next billion years. Only the superficial things have changed. It is fashionable to talk about the changing man. A communicator must be concerned with the unchanging man-what compulsions drive him, what instincts dominate his every action, even though his language too often camouflages what really motivates him. For if you know all these things about a man, you can touch him at the core of his being. One thing is unchangingly sure. The creative man with an insight into human nature, with an artistry to touch and move people will succeed. Without them he will fail.”

While I’m throwing quotes around like an inebriated Stephen Fry, here’s another corker from everyone’s go to good egg Nelson Mandella: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” The take-away: make sure your advertising sings the same tune the consumer is singing in their head. 

Great advertisers have an inspiring vision for the brand, and for the future in general, they have a point of view, something to say, an angle on what’s important in life. They want to create a zeitgeist, a movement, they want to change something. But part of being a visionary is being an expert in reality. All comedy, all art, all good advertising, is essentially observational. Communicating some human truth that we have noticed through observation or personal experience. If you abstract what we do enough it comes down to making a human truth tangible.

It seems to me that a good question to ask yourself when trying to promote a brand is to ask “What human good does the product help the customer achieve?” When you have identified this universal human good, find a way of personifying and exaggerating that in a campaign.

Here’s a brilliant example of this from Wieden and Kennedy, specifically their Nike account: the “Find your Greatness” campaign. It reflects the deep longing we all have to be great. Most of us will never be heroes or legends. But greatness is democratic and relative, we can all get glimpses at the exceptional in our everyday lives and that is an inspiring idea. W&K capture this wonderfully here and here.

People are always thinking about themselves. They are asking one question: what’s in it for me? You better have a good answer otherwise no one is going to listen, they are just going to say: “SO WHAT?”

As Hegarty says with characteristic clarity “The key to great marketing is never to forget about your audience”, he continues “What makes someone who markets a brand so effective is their bringing the outside world in”. Let life shine through your copy.

Mark Watson on culture

The comedian Mark Watson did a tweet the other day which said “Basically the audience gets the comedy it wants (both at local level and in more general terms).”

The point is that the gate-keepers of culture: the channel controllers, the advertisers etc are responsible for guiding public taste. They set the agenda, the cultural bar, by what they let onto our screens and so on. Artists must react to that taste and give the audience largely what they want, otherwise they won’t have an audience. 

Basically: don’t blame the creative for cultural decline. Blame the gate-keepers that have started this race to the bottom.

Why Batman is a role model for you, but Bruce Wayne is a chump

A thing you hear a lot in comedy (and in life) is “just be yourself”. But what if people aren’t that interested when you are being yourself? What if you could do more of the things you wanted to do if you actually behaved in a different way than perhaps is natural for you to do?

I read an interview today with Dale Steyn the magnificent South African fast bowler who will be leading their attack against England in the Test series which starts on Thursday. It was pointed out that he was shy and relentlessly polite and humble off the field, but aggressive, cocky and outgoing on it. He was asked why. He said “Once I step over that white line I become The Bowler”. He is pointing out that he in fact has two independent selves, two characters that he employs at different times. He is himself (shy, self-effacing, quiet) when he is off the field, but he turns on a special persona that helps him get results when he is performing on the field of play. He knows that by being The Bowler he will intimidate batsmen, fire up his team and himself, and take more wickets. He is not religiously wed to the mantra: be yourself. Here’s the new mantra: be yourself, unless you would get better results being someone else.

Why are people wedded to their “selves”? There is nothing about their current self that is intrinsic to them: our self is a blank slate when we are born, an empty vase, that is filled by factors we have no control over throughout our life: our family, friends, teachers, life experiences. We are everyone, but no one. So why not change it? Get control over your “self”, rather than leave it to the random forces of fate.

Showmanship is one of the most crucial components of a world class entertainer, yet it is one of the hardest qualities to foster in yourself because it rarely comes naturally. And showmanship is not necessarily a character trait you want to have at all times: socially, for example, it is over-bearing and irritating. So we programme ourselves to be modest, quiet, to not rock the boat, to shun attention or pass it on quickly if we receive it. We try not to lead people socially either, because we don’t want to be bossy and people don’t want to get told what to do. But showmanship is about leading a crowd, and crowds want a leader. Showmanship is about uber-confidence, showing off, energy, charisma, exaggeration, outrageousness. It’s about revelling in the attention and putting on a show that makes people excited. It’s about not being you.

It’s up to you to create this unforgettable persona. Russell Brand quotes the Simpson’s creator Matt Groening who said that cartoon characters should be recognisable in silhouette. He said that having read that “At that point I made the decision to be distinctive looking”. He created an artifice. It was an artistic and career based choice, it didn’t come from his own “self”. The performance persona of the person doesn’t really exist, it is a carefully created and presented fictional package (although the performance persona and real person may eventually over-lap in time: for example, Brand says he feels more comfortable in his performance persona because the rules and expectations are much simpler). Having a separate performer self is freeing: criticism is no longer personal, and you are without the constraints of your previous identity so you can express yourself in a different ways. The performance self is simply an entertainer, a concept, a separate thing.

On this subject, I read an interview with Lady Gaga once who said that “to be famous, you have to act famous”. She went on:

“I was interested in the idea that if you carry yourself in a certain way people will wonder who you are. The way I dressed and talked about music, art and fashion, people said, I don’t know who she is, but I want to know who she is.”

Being “you” may not be enough to be famous: to attract and lead a following, in any walk of life. You may not want to be famous, fair enough. But surely you want to have impact in some way?

No one is saying you have to have this big persona, this stand-out showman front, all the time. If you have created it then it can be something you can turn on and off. Marilyn Munroe could turn herself on and off: she could walk down the street as Norma Jeane Mortenson and nobody would recognise her. But if she walked down the street as Marilyn she would be mobbed. She knew the rules of that persona, and she could inhabit it in a heartbeat when she needed to have impact. Both personas manifested themselves totally differently, and had different aims and domains.

It’s time that you became schizophrenic. Leave you in the dressing room: when you walk on that stage you are someone else. All the rules are out of the window. You are Batman now, not Bruce Wayne.

Why being clever isn’t going to cut it (Or what you can learn from the History Boys)

Here’s what I learnt last night at my preview. It’s one of the most important things I’ve learnt in my career:

IDEAS DON’T MOVE PEOPLE. STORIES ABOUT REAL PEOPLE DO.

Making logical arguments, presenting ideas, just bores people. They feel they are being lectured. They turn off. Or even if they are interested in what you are saying they can’t take it all in because they are focussing on listening and interacting with your show.

So don’t bother with the clever ideas, the clever arguments. They will go in one ear and out of the other.

People rarely remember the message, but they do remember the holistic effect: how they felt in the show.

Always put the stories first, and the takeaway last. The story grips and moves, putting them in the palm of your hand, when they are there give them the gift of the idea as pithy as possible before their mind wanders off somewhere else.

Here’s another thing I learnt:

WHAT YOU THINK IS IMPORTANT/INTERESTING DOES NOT NECESSARILLY EQUAL ENTERTAINMENT.

If people have come to be entertained, and you present yourself as someone who provides that, then make sure you do your job. You are a showman, not a preacher. An artist, not an academic. A comedian, not a philosopher.

Remember people aren’t judging your intellect. They are only asking themselves one question: is this an enjoyable experience or not? Don’t let your own intellectual insecurity, or pressure from snobbish “artists”, crowd this fact.

Here’s the paradox: by not trying to be too clever you are being clever. Because the message will hit home. It will be simple, it will be wrapped up in an authentic story that moves people, and therefore people will remember it.

Clever doesn’t have impact. Clever doesn’t change people. Stories do.

Before I go here’s something I thought about walking home from my preview last night. No one cares about clever people who know lots of stuff, not really. They don’t change things. They don’t have impact. They aren’t memorable. They aren’t fun, or the sort of people you’d like to hang around with. The key to life is to:

1.  Be Authentic.

2. Stand-out.  (Don’t be right, be different.)

Here’s a quote you should print out and put above your desk. It comes from Hector in the History Boys by Alan Bennett:

“The wrong end of the stick is the right one. A question has a front door and a back door. Go in the back, or better still, the side. Flee the crowd. Follow Orwell. Be perverse…History nowadays is not a matter of conviction. It’s a performance. It’s entertainment. And if it isn’t, make it so... truth is no more at issue in an examination than thirst at a wine-tasting or fashion at a strip-tease.”

The incredible power of delete

The “delete” button is the most important button on your key board.

Often less is more. Simple is best.

By cutting stuff out, the things that remain have more impact.

I’ve learnt this from putting the finishing touches to my Edinburgh show. I’ve had to cut jokes that work, jokes that I like because they don’t fit into the show. Perversely by losing the laughs I have made the show better.

Delete is the hardest button to press, so get help doing it: get notes from a director (like I did), do a draft and give it to someone else to edit. Other people have a distance from your work that you cannot have. They can give you rude truths that you might not see, or choose to ignore because you don’t what to throttle your baby.

I’ve not just cut jokes but also simplified the message. You can say too much, diluting each message, and also confusing the piece. By saying everything you say nothing.

The takeaway: your editing is as important as your writing.

Another part of the power of delete is your decision when to jettison a creative project, an idea, a joke. You should be ruthless in what you cull from your output. By getting stuff that is crap off the slate you have more time to come up with something better. Don’t waste time on something that is average: kill it and come up with something else. When a joke I do dies at a new material gig I don’t view that as a creative failure, I view that as a creative victory: I know that joke is rubbish. I can let it go and try a different one. People are slow to chuck stuff they have made away, but they are just slowing up their progress. Put yourself under pressure to produce.

1. Be prolific.

2.  Be ruthless. Delete your way to excellence.

You shouldn’t just delete stuff that isn’t working. Delete stuff that is working brilliantly after a set cut off point. Create a creative obis to force yourself to come up with something new. You only get better by practicing, by raising your bar, by putting yourself under pressure. How do you put yourself under pressure? Take away the comfort zone of your body of work, prove yourself all over again. Louis CK was meandering along, an average club act, but got massive by deciding to turn over an hour long show every year. At the end of the year he throws it away and starts from scratch again, working up stuff in low level clubs. He is like an open-mic guy again, and his bravery is rewarded: he gets better and better.

That’s why I chose to do my first solo show this year. I was totally unprepared in terms of material and skill-set in September 2011, I knew that if I wasn’t ready it was going to be a month of embarrassment. So I have got myself ready. Other comics say “I’m going to wait till I’m ready”. How about forcing yourself to be ready? If your ambition was to be physically strong, you wouldn’t say “I’m going to wait until my strength gradually improves naturally” you would get in the gym and do weights that were too heavy for you until the muscle got bigger.

That’s enough preaching. My show better be good after that!

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Killing cliché

I’ve been listening to the Comedians Comedian podcast, a fortnightly podcast hosted by the stand-up Stuart Goldsmith where he interviews excellent comics about their writing process and careers. It is always terrific and you can get them here.

The most recent one was with comedy legend Arthur Smith. He said something great about cliché.

He says that writing is always about killing clichés to some extent, to describe a thing in a way that it has never been described before. Rather eloquently he describes cliché as a pre-digested thought put into a pre-digested phrase. It is unanalyzed, un-broken down, not fully understood, not the crux or the essence of the idea. It is an unexplored emotional response to the world. It is lazy thinking vomited out in a lazy phrase. He goes on to assert, correctly, that you want your thought to be original, not to be filtered through somebody else’s perception.

Smith goes on to quote Alan Coren, via his daughter Victoria, saying that if you’ve got a subject don’t write down the first thing that comes into your head because that’s what everybody else will think of. Don’t write down the second thing, because that that’s what clever people will think of, but write down the third. Because the third thing will be entirely you. Finally, ask yourself: is this something someone less talented than me could have come up with?

Resisting the cliché is difficult. It’s about delaying gratification. As we write we live with this fear that we will not produce anything, so we grope around for anything at first, and we find something that works: it may be structurally sound and reliably funny because we know that similar things have been known to work in the past. We receive this rush of dopamine into our brain, a rush of creative joy, we are relieved. And when we have achieved this it is easy to feel satisfied and stop, or to move onto the next easy dopamine hit. But to create something truly worthwhile and new we need to push through this first phase, trawling through the arid dessert of the creative process, until we eventually solve the problem. That is hard, painful, and often goes nowhere. But there is no other way.

Remember the goal is this “create something that no-one has created before, something new, something that only I could have come up with”. Not “to create something”. The tyranny of the blank page often scares us to hiding within the comforting walls of cliché, but we must run screaming into battle against the creative obis, the unknown. We do this knowing that most days we will be obliterated in a storm of arrows, but that one day we may make it through, slay the beast of mediocrity, and create something truly memorable. The take-away is simple: be a warrior.

It is hard to resist the easy creative task. That’s why people love “brain storming” so much: you generate huge volume of ideas and feel like you have done a good morning’s work. But most of these are first step ideas, aka clichés. The hard work that brings true innovation is found in the second, third, fourth steps as you explore the initial idea and nose around in the nooks and crannies, the shadows, until you find something hidden from the view of mere mortals. Then you show it to the world, and they think you are a magician. But you are just a bloke in a cafe with a pen who didn’t stop when it got hard.

I struggle with doing the tough creative work. I view the first few years of stand-up as getting all my shit jokes, clichés, out of my system so I can start writing something that is actually approaching new and interesting. I decided in September 2011 that I was going to do an hour long show in Edinburgh 2012. At the time I had about 7 minutes of material after a ruthless cull of stuff I wasn’t happy with. I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to fill the time, so I set about writing loads and loads with the focus on volume not ingenuity. I had no creative filters, and I wrote a lot of pap. But the journey has been worth it:  I’ve learnt that being creative, and creatively prolific, is as much about what you delete as what you produce. It’s about setting your filters, defining the creative problem with some constraints. Fill the first page with clichés, use them as starting points to focus on more interesting angles, and then burn the first page. You’ll have more time to focus on the good stuff (don’t waste 8 months of new material gigs on a load of clichéd shit), and you’ll develop a voice, and an act that stands out from the beige crap that plenty of other people are using.

Finally, Arthur Smith made another good point: if an audience has laughed a lot at a line, there is almost certainly room for more jokes, a topper, hopefully a whole routine. It’s almost free laughs. This is a good principle: spend longer looking for something truly original, and when you’ve found it make sure you milk it for all its worth. 

Why you should be more like a goth (and Stuart Baggs from The Apprentice)

A friend who works in marketing tipped me off about this guy called Rory Sutherland who is an advertising expert, and a phenomenal speaker. He has done three TED talks, they are available here.

There are lots of lessons we can draw from what he has to say:

1.       Two types of value

There are two types of value: so called “real” value (the objective quality of something), and intangible/tangential value (the value we get from a product over and above its objective contents). Advertising’s job is to create intangible value.

Sutherland argues that there is no such thing as “real” value. We find it impossible as human beings to differentiate between objective quality and the holistic experience we have when consuming something.

Perspective is everything: things are not what they are, they are what we think they are. And things are what we compare them to.

Yet we make psychology subordinate to everything else, obsessing over improving the objective quality of the product rather than creating intangible value. As he says: Eurostar spent about 5 billion quid taking 40 minutes off the overall journey time by investing in new tracks etc. But, instead (and with plenty of spare change), they could have spent the money hiring the world’s best male and female supermodels to walk up and down the aisle serving free champagne for the duration of the journey and people would have a more enjoyable, memorable experience and actually ask for the trains to be slowed down. Psychological value is often the best kind, for example: the value of a brand. I saw a couple with Louis Vuitton luggage outside South Kensington station yesterday. That luggage is not better made than something half the price. But it has psychological value: it is a status good. It says to the world: I am successful. (It also says: I am needy and have no taste, but that’s another story!). Symbolic value is real.

THIS HAS HUGE RELEVANCE FOR HOW YOU COMMUNICATE YOURSELF TO THE WORLD: take responsibility for your brand. Your brand is not who you are, it is who people think you are. “People don’t understand me, they don’t get me, they don’t know who I am, I don’t get the chance to show how great I am”: these are problems of communication, of image, that you can solve. It is a problem in picking up women as much as it is in stand-up comedy. Your hidden shallows, may allow you to communicate your hidden depths. And in advertising these depths we invite other people to explore them.

The psychological enjoyment people get from an experience is how they attribute value, not the objective quality of it (a 7 minute wait on a tube platform with a countdown clock is better than a 7 minute wait without one). It’s pointless improving the product with changing people’s perception. They will be getting a better product but be ignorant to the improvement. Like the Royal Mail: people think the Royal Mail is shit. But actually 98% of mail gets there on time. To improve the Royal Mail, they don’t need to work on the 98% figure but actually show people how good the service already is. We cannot tell the difference between the quality of the product and the context within which we consume it: if the restaurant is fantastic fun to be in, we just assume the food is good.

So you’re product has improved? Great. Now re-launch it with a new image. The novelty will get people to take notice and realise that it’s got better. Incremental improvement in the objective value of a product as little IMPACT.

Intangible value is created through fashion, how you wear your hair, your online presence, how you send your e-mails, your answer phone message, the gifts you give, your business card: your brand. “Brand” gets a bad name, because we associate it with faceless, cynical business. We also associate it with that awful man from The Apprentice who repeatedly asserted that he was “Stuart Baggs-the brand”. Bizarrely, by standing out and being a dick, he was memorable and created a brand that created him lasting value even a few years after the series was broadcast (spanning books, media appearances, an Edinburgh show, and a consultancy business). Now, I am not saying you should be an idiot deliberately to make yourself memorable, but you should appreciate the legacy of being memorable in some way, of standing out from other people, and also appreciate the value of your “brand” in achieving this.

It can be as simple as having a memorable and strange haircut. I know people criticise a lot of young stand-ups for being nothing but a haircut. Sometimes they have a point. But here is the important take-away: if you blend into everyone else, if you communicate you are average, then human nature is to assume that is what you are, REGARDLESS OF YOUR OBJECTIVE QUALITY. They will put you in the pile “solid, but uninteresting”. That is where mediocrity lives and careers die.

Fashion contains messages and you need to control these. For example, you can identify the tribes people are in from the way they present themselves to the world. People with loads of piercings, awful pony tails, leather capes, eye shadow and so on don’t dress like that because they think it makes them look good. It is because they want to be a member of the tribe, let’s call them “Goths” (although this is a simplification), the tribe that says: I don’t agree with this society, or the pressures of it, and I want to stand-outside of it. Appearance is a great way to communicate this. It is a low level protest that they can make all day every day. It is political, subversive, but in a very low level way. What does your appearance say about you? The truth is: we don’t want to stand-out really. We seek simply mild differentiation between very narrow variables, because we are all social cowards. Social cowards hug bland mediocrity like a warm towel. And no one knows who they are.

2.       Sweat the small stuff: Virgin Atlantic when it launched had salt and pepper shakers made from silver that looked like dogs. People thought they were cool and they were immensely memorable: they providing a talking point that helped the customers spread the news about the brand. Of course people thought about nicking them, but on the bottom Virgin wrote “stolen from virgin atlantic upper class”, another hilarious talking point. You remember this experience for years. Small detail, low cost, huge effect. Imagination is everything. Small innovations in your image and user experience make a massive difference in memorability and getting your brand to spread. The detail of your brand, your image, your product, your clothes can have a huge impact. What do you remember of someone’s clothes? What do you comment on? Usually an accessory. These are critical non-essentials.#

3.       The interface determines the behaviour. If you had a large red button in your living room that if you pressed it it would automatically transfer 50 quid into your pension, you would save a lot more. Marketing has done a very good job of creating opportunities for impulse buying. You change your decisions by changing the interface, but structuring the options differently.

4.       “Poetry is when you make familiar things new, and new things familiar”. He says that’s a good definition of what advertising is about, and it’s a pretty good definition for whatever art form you’re passionate about is.

5.       “We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders”. Has your product got some magic in it? Something that will make them go “wow”. That will make their brain’s fizz, and their hearts ache?

Offering more than they expect

Seth Godin is probably my favourite thinker at the moment. You really should read his blog. He wrote one last week that was so brilliant that I would like to reproduce it in full here:

People don't care how much you offer them.

They care about whether you exceeded their expectations.

If you want to delight, if you want to create a remarkable experience, if you want people to talk about you or buy your stock, the secret is simple: give them more than they expected.

If I walk into your store and it looks and feels like stores I've been into before, my expectations are locked in. Now what? But if I walk into your showroom and it's like nothing I've ever experienced before, you get a chance to set my expectations, right? Marketing isn't merely bragging. Marketing creates a culture, tells a story and puts on a show.

In our rush to get picked or get noticed or build buzz, the instinct is to promise more. Perhaps it pays to promise less instead, to radically change expectations and to reset what it means to deliver on the promise of delight.

Are you offering more than they expect? Be more than just a comedian, be a poet, be a master of pathos, be a showman.

Godin’s advice reminded me of a letter that Teller (from Penn and Teller) wrote in reply to a rookie magician:

“Love something besides magic, in the arts. Get inspired by a particular poet, film-maker, sculptor, composer, you will never be the first Brian Allen Brushwood of magic if you want to be Penn and Teller. But if you want to be, say, the Salvador Dali of magic, well there’s an opening.

I should be a film editor. I’m a magician. And if I’m good it’s because I should be a film editor. Back should have written operas or plays. But instead he worked in 18^th century counterpoint. That’s why his counterpoints have so much more point than other contrapuntalists. They have passion and plot. Shakespeare, on the other hand, should have been a musician, writing counterpoint. That’s why his plays stand out from the others through their plot and music.”

In the comedy world this reminded me of the legendary Daniel Kitson. Kitson should have been a song writer or a poet, that’s why he is probably the greatest stand-up that has ever lived.

What are you offering that goes above and beyond what people expect?

What’s your plan for getting better at what you do?

There’s been a lot of debate about why England are so bad at football. Everybody seems to agree that our players are technically inferior to their counterparts on the continent and that this is because of our lack of suitably qualified coaches, and poor youth football set-up. Everyone’s heard of the 10,000 hour rule. The idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to get good at anything. But practice doesn’t make perfect, good practice does. It’s called “deliberate practice”: these are specifically designed practice routines that focus on very specific technical aspects of a skill and push the player outside of his comfort zone until he builds new neural pathways in his/her brain that allow them to be successful. These routines are usually designed by a coach. It is crucial that you are forever focussing on your weaknesses, pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. Most of the practice that most people do in their chosen domain yields almost no effect, because they repeat what they know rather than confronting their weaknesses, at which point progress plateaus.

In Spain their famous “tika takka” style play is possible because their players were brought up playing rondo (high-intensity, circular passing at speed) and Brazilians were playing futsal (on tiny pitches with a heavier, smaller ball). Both approaches force players to think quickly, to develop passing accuracy and to learn close control.

The idea is to find REPEATABLE drills that focus on SPECIFIC areas of technical and mental ability, ideally designed by an expert coach.

The key to skill acquisition is feedback. You need data to get an idea of whether you are doing it right.

In English football, young players play on big pitches. They touch the ball maybe once or twice a minute. That is a small amount of feedback as to how good your close control technique is, compared to if you touched the ball 8 times on a much smaller pitch. So we need VOLUME of feedback, so we need to practice a lot, but we also need QUALITY and SPECIFICITY of feedback, otherwise it can be hard to isolate the problem in performance.

Coerver Coaching, one of the leading coaching systems in world football, has come up with 47 different ways to take the ball past an opponent. They have deconstructed each separate way of doing this (step-overs etc), and created a set of exercises that help you learn how to do it.

The problem in comedy is that we don’t have a model of technical excellence, of best practice, because the literature is poor. So we cannot isolate a series of different skills, and then break these down into a series of steps that can be taught using specific practice drills. And we don’t have many expert coaches, especially expert coaches that can help with the higher end skills of comics who have gone beyond being open-mic performers. This is because stand-up is a relatively young art-form. Stand-up as we know it is maybe 30 years old. Football is hundreds of years old. But it is an intriguing idea about what might be possible when we have this base of knowledge. The closest thing I have heard to deliberate practice is Second City Improv in Chicago where performers improvise an hour long show every night of the year (give or take) and perform a two hour sketch show too. They are working all their comedy and performing muscles for three hours a day at least. They will become great in ten years if they do this. And they do: pretty much every American comedy star has come out of this factory of comedic excellence.

Immersion seems an important part of learning. La Massia, Barcelona’s vaunted academy, has students living there. They think, talk, and play football every day. And they are in the process with other players, and lots of coaches: they have accountability partners and people who they can compete against and benchmark themselves against. This is front of mind every day, almost every second. That is why they are unlikely to duck out of practice. Anecdotally it is amazing to me how many great comics grow up in small peer groups. They learn off each other, subconsciously compete, and also are their own accountability partners/encouragers.

There is an excellent article here on deliberate practice here.

So what to do now? Over the coming months I am going to interviews experts with the aim of coming up with practice drills to encourage excellence in stand-up comedy. I will publish in an e-book called “Deliberate Practice for Comedy” which you will be able to get for free from this site if you join the mailing list. So why not join today?

Footnote:

Some of you are thinking “Gigs are deliberate practice”. Sort of. If you are doing gigs in nice clubs, with your good club 20 every night, you aren’t really practicing at all: you’re just doing the same thing again and again. If you were doing new material every night, that would be deliberate practice. But that isn’t always possible, especially if you are a pro. Anyhow, there are surely higher end skills, and habits of thought, that we can isolate and train in a variety of ways. This is a debate we can have: I would love to hear your ideas on this, especially if you have drill ideas. Tweet me here.

The Hack Trap (or why I have thrown away lots of my material)

I am finishing writing my Edinburgh show for this August. I have been going through the 3 notebooks I have filled this year with jokes and ideas, with the aim of writing another 10/15 minutes of material. And I have been crossing most of them out, 4 weeks before the festival starts. Not only that, I have also culled some material from my set that works, that’s tried and trusted (self-service check-outs anyone?).

Why have I done this? Because these jokes/ideas are “hack” or easy. I define “hack” as topics that have been covered before by other comics (or are being covered now). I define “easy” as Padlovian jokes where the structure is good and will get an audience response, but the contents are uninspired or dirty.

Why would I throw way almost a year’s worth of work? Why am I getting rid of material that works and will work in Edinburgh? Simple: it is effective but not unique. It is good enough but not outstanding. Being very good is not enough anymore in a competitive market place. You must be remarkable. You must stand-out. I am taking a short-run risk in order to make a long term impact.

It is riskier, dumber, in the long run to be similar to other people.


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Why I cried when I saw a car this week

Advertisers have discovered stories. There is an advert about a Volkswagen Golf at the moment that I can’t watch because for some reason it makes me cry. This is a major trend (the use of story in ads, not things making me cry. I’m OK guys.). The product is often not featured until the last second. As we have gotten better at ignoring adverts, so advertisers have tried to get better at keeping us watching them. Advertising is becoming a true art. They use stories to hook us in immediately: as curious humans we are truly fallible to narrative. They provide a compelling, emotive narrative featuring characters we can associate with and care about because they are vulnerable. And then at the end, when they have provided all the value, they try to sell us the product. Two conclusions:

1.  As an artist (or entrepreneur/marketer) you may have a great product but no one will care about it unless you can package it and sell it as a compelling, authentic story. This principle is applicable to everyone: screenwriters with great dialogue and hilarious characters that are wasted because of a flimsy plot, stand-ups with great jokes that are presented as an unconnected mess which reduce their impact and lose people’s interest, businesses with a great product but who can’t convince people why it is relevant to their lives and how it will fit into THEIR narrative.

2. Marketing is no longer about interrupting people to tell them to buy your product. It is about giving them a great experience for free and then suggesting they might get more of it they buy what you have to offer. You’re going to have to be creatively prolific and generous. But there is no other way.

You’re a loser but that’s great news

I’ve just watched this TED talk on vulnerability by Brene Brown. I think it has important conclusions for screen writers and stand-ups alike. In fact for any artist and perhaps for marketers as well, because after all we are all telling stories right?

 Brown says connection is what people want beyond anything else. This seems hard to argue with. We all want the feeling of being known, loved, being part of something. We are at our best when we are entwined in some way with other people.

As an audience of a film or stand-up show we want to connect with the characters or the performer, even if it’s just for an hour or so. Connection, however ephemeral, is wonderful.

We connect best with people who are prepared to be vulnerable.

In order for connection to happen we have to allow ourselves to be seen. To be really seen: warts and all. You need a sense of courage: be upfront about who you are with people, be willing to be naked as Charlie Kaufman would say. You need the courage to be imperfect, flawed, ridiculous.

We often do not put forward an authentic version of ourselves because we feel ashamed of who we are. Shame about who we are also causes us to put forward a diluted version of ourselves. People who experience high levels of connection live lives of authenticity: they were willing to let go of who they think they should be, in order to be who they are. Shame is the feeling of being unworthy of being loved. It’s the feeling of “I’m not good enough” in some way: “I’m not thin enough” etc. In our culture we feel the need to perfect, better than we are. We are bombarded with images of beautiful, rich people we perfect skin and 6 packs.

People who experience connection fully embrace vulnerability. People might not like them, but they present themselves as themselves none the less. They put themselves out there despite the risk of rejection. We often hide our vulnerability because we are afraid that people won’t like what they see. We want certainty in our social interactions. But we can never have that, however we present ourselves.

What is the secret to connecting? The secret to get people to like you as a stand-up, or to get people to love and care about your characters, or to like you as a person?

Show vulnerability. Present your totality. Admit flaws. Be authentic, be you. We’re all imperfect, and people find imperfection seductive. Your imperfections, your characters imperfections, make people feel less lonely. And if you can make people feel less lonely in a world where love is scarce, everybody will like you. But you can only get people to like you if you are willing to present bits of you that are unlikable. It’s a weird paradox.

We are on a never ending search for people who excuse our own mediocrity. People in which we can confide our weirdness and eccentricity, or who at least make us feel it is ok. People who don’t stare at us when we lick all the flavouring off crisps before we eat it. Part of the novelty of a new relationship is finding someone who doesn’t find us revolting. You see: we are all losers and that’s why we like them. We all have the feeling that we don’t want to get found out, that we don’t want people to realise we don’t know what we are doing and are making it up as we go along, that we have wildly exaggerated our expertise and competence, that we are scared, that our past is embarrassing. To be vulnerable is to express this feeling to people, and that way we will find people who accept us despite of it.

You can have too much vulnerability. People who are too flawed are difficult to like, people who are too vulnerable are irritating. Your character, your stand-up persona, you in real life should play jazz with your emotions. I saw some amazing jazz last night, the bass player, the pianist, the drummer, the saxophonist took it in turns to play a majestic solo and then the rest of the gang would join back in at the perfect time when the novelty of the solo had worn off. It was as if they had a sixth sense for people’s patience. The note of vulnerability should be given a solo, but remember it is only part of the band. And it’s when we can play all the instruments at once in perfect rhythm that we make something truly memorable.

Kaufman, cricket and utilitarianism. or HOW TO NOT BE BORING!

Yesterday I listened to Charlie Kaufman’s Bafta podcast on screenwriting. You can listen to his talk here.

His talk is inspiring, lyrical and reassuringly laden with artistic integrity.

But what I took from it was Kaufman’s insistence that we shouldn’t be obsessed with being an expert in our craft. With being technically perfect.

Technical obsession produces work that is mechanical, sterile, samey, unoriginal, clinical. The main reason why this is the case is that cold theory crowds out you. You are what makes your art unique. You filter the world through your eyes, and your work must be an expression of this unique point of view. This is important in producing original artistic work, but is also an excellent marketing point: how can you stand out? Use your own factory of novelty: be yourself. Technical perfection often leads to dull work: your flaws are what makes you interesting. Flaws create difference and unpredictability, and therefore character and excitement. You don’t want perfection in people, or indeed anything.

It’s important to say that you need to know enough technical theory to allow the quality of your work to shine through: for example, if you have no clue about plot structure your screenplay will basically be unreadable. But the point is that you should focus on knowing enough technique, and then improvise around it. It is only a loose framework in which you should play, not your number one priority. Kaufman says craft should not come first, meaning should: the truth about the world you are trying to communicate. Write from the soul rather than according to a manual. You need to be willing to be naked.

In the world of stand-up you see a lot of people who aren’t willing to be naked. Whether it be because of fear, comedy course orthodoxy, or simply because they don’t know who they are and what they want to say yet. Having something to “say” isn’t necessarily to be political, but it is to have an authored point of view, a distinctive way of filtering reality, a unique perception. And this perception only comes from writing, writing, writing. Explore yourself and your ideas, don’t substitute inspiration and insight for structural excellence. The more authored your view the more watchable you are as a comic: people start to love you and not your jokes. They just want to find out more and more about how you see the world. They can develop a kind-of friendship with you because you are presenting a humanity to them, rather than a polished robotic act. This is the reason one liner comics often struggle to remain interesting for longer than 20 minutes: it gets samey, and you feel an emotional distance to them. Jimmy Carr is probably the exception, in my experience. But that is because he takes care to do a lot of crowd work in his show to break up the one-line jokes, and me get to know him through his interactions with real people. Otherwise it is just an 80 minute presentation of comedic equations.

I’ve struggled with this in my career, but I am getting better. And awareness is the first step to learning. I am now consciously incompetent. I’ve been criticised for not putting enough of me in my set, and for failing to develop momentum due to the fact that I have been known to flit from funny bit to funny bit without developing the emotional connection that comes from the audience getting to know you. When they like you, their good will sweeps you along and adds pace to the show, as laughs become consistent waves, a blowing wind, rather than short sharp claps of thunder. This is quite a tough thing to describe, but the type of laughter I am talking about is similar to the fits of giggles you might have when having drinks with a group of friends.

I’ve learnt that there may be a reason to keep things in which aren’t necessarily the funniest thing that could be in that space in your set or show. The key is this: don’t judge each moment of content on a consequentialist basis, but judge the piece’s impact holistically. It may make the piece unpredictable, varied, textured and uniquely you. This is an important realisation: people don’t judge your show, film (or whatever) like judges judge a boxing match: scoring it round by round, on a scene by scene basis, or joke by joke. They don’t remember specifics, but they do remember their emotional reaction to the whole experience. On this subject, I have just a read an AA Gill Review of Mark Hix’s new restaurant in the Sunday Times. Hix is a famous British chef but Gill marks him out for special praise because “Hix is one of the few people who realise that hospitality is the main ingredient in catering”. Gill’s point is that food is only one element in the whole dining out experience. If our general emotional response to the whole evening is that we’ve had a great time, the fact that the dessert was a bit crap is irrelevant. I’ve worked in pubs and restaurants where managers haven’t understood this, they think if the service is efficient and the beer is delicious then the customers will be happy. No: they just want to leave feeling like they’ve had a great time, and that is a more complex dynamic best understood looking at the totality of their experience.

I have had similar issues with a sitcom script I am developing with a funny writer/performer called Amy Hoggart. We have talking to a well-know production company about it, and the feedback we have received is that it is very funny, but not necessarily a great script. It is not a great script because it lacks a bit of warmth, and the characters perhaps lack some depth. This is because we took a consequentialist approach to the writing. The funniest line may not be the best line, because a good sitcom script has a broader range of qualifying criteria than simply “funny”.

In comedy films you are supposed to have a love plot for the main character/s. This is because it raises the stakes, they have more to lose, jeopardy increases and this improves the impact of the jokes. The love scenes aren’t funny, but they are essential to making the script work. The increased impact comes from the variety: we habituate to jokes and so mixing then up with something else makes the remaining gags funnier. And we also care about the characters if we get to know them, see their flaws, see them fail and then try again: which makes them funnier.

The idea of variety increasing impact of jokes reminds me of a debate in the world of cricket about what is the more entertaining format: Test cricket (which lasts 5 days), or 20/20 cricket (which lasts 2 hours). In 20/20 you get a binge of excitement: there are lots of 4s and 6s hit by the batsmen, run-outs, lots of wickets fall quickly. But is it more entertaining game than Test cricket which takes longer? I would argue no because it lacks the jeopardy of Test cricket: if you have invested 5 days into something you have more to lose, and the matches (and victories) are rarer. Further, because boundaries for the batsmen, and wickets for the bowlers, are harder to come by and rarer you value them more and they are more exciting: we do not habituate to them, there is a great anticipation for the next one, and it is a greater contrast against the relatively dull monotony of the rest of the match. Now, I am not saying your script (or stand-up set) should be dull and monotonous! But it should be varied. Richard Herring says he likes to keep the crap bits in his podcasts, because the good bits have more impact. Normality is boring, whatever the nature of it. If every line is a funny joke, then it feels samey and is (perversely) boring. This is, it should be noted, not possible in our 5 minute long comedy culture. This same phenomena is audible in modern music: the biggest difference between great music and pop pap is the variety within the songs, the assortments of breakdowns.

Tony Allen, regarded as the godfather of alternative comedy, has written one of the few good books about the art of stand-up. He says it is all about attitude and juxtaposition of attitude. You have to be a contradiction, a hypocrite, inconsistent, drenched in irony, infuriating. Your set needs paradoxes, light and shade, changes of pace, variety, texture. This allows work to feel authored, and emotionally compelling. It gives a feeling of momentum and movement because you are oscillating between different emotional charges. He writes that there should be a feel of risk: that this might get uncomfortable, that this could be a disaster. This adds jeopardy and also an alternative point on the emotional spectrum for the audience to enjoy.  Your set should be a kaleidoscope. That is why the best comedies have love stories at their heart, and why the darkest dramas have comic moments. Audience interaction, breaking down the fourth wall is a great way to do this: risk adds weight to the laugh. A tool used brilliantly in the current West End sensation “One Man, Two Guvnors” where the performers obliterate the 4^th wall interacting with the audience and getting them on stage in the play.

Allen writes that Lenny Bruce’s most important contribution to stand-up comedy has less to do with breaking taboos around choice of language and subject matter, and more to do with his be-bop jazz technique: improvising with attitude, jumping from light to shade and back again in all it’s different textures. “Lenny Bruce delivered his witty insights and opinions in a spectrum of personal voices all in close attendance, but none getting to solo for more than a few seconds.” This should be your ambition. He goes on to write: “What made Bill Hicks such a compelling performer was this ability to get the audience bristling, to deliberately unsettle them, and from there to proceed to make them laugh. The particular nature of that tension, and the quality of the focus that it creates, is unique to live stand-up comedy and Bill, like Keith Allen a few years before him, explored it thoroughly.” Both Hicks and Bruce had standard club routines that they would mix in with their riskier stuff, and would play the room carefully to win people back if they were losing them. The point is: they had a big range of gears they could go through, take themselves and their audience through a huge emotional range, whereas the standard club act is one paced.

Stewart Lee is probably the modern master at juxtaposing content and pace. He talks a lot about building and exploiting tension in the audience, then the laugh can feel like a release for them. In “How I Escaped My Certain Fate” he writes: “One of the exciting things about stand-up is the genuine possibility of failure...you want to lose them for a bit and then have to win them back”. He loves the feeling, audiences love the feeling, that you are teetering on the brink of losing a room. Safety is boring. He goes on to comment on his routine: “I was quite happy for it to die, as it opened up enormous possibilities for improvising around its failure...I really enjoy this aspect of stand-up-how failure creates opportunities to create subsequent victories-and increasingly I build pseudo-failures into the shows to give myself and the audience the thrill of a struggle.”

So, in short: don’t be a utilitarian. Be you.

Why you should celebrate being a serial failure

I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s book Poke The Box. Which is a bible for innovation. If you are interested in how ideas spread then check Seth out here.

“Poke the Box” is a gospel about starting things. Godin begs you to be an initiator: someone who starts something. Be someone who is prepared to fail along the way if it helps you make a difference.

Capital is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Money is no longer the foundation of the new connected economy. Ideas, and initiators who lead with a passionate and relentless desire to change the status quo, are. What are the key attributes?  Firstly: resilience; secondly: a holistic outlook towards failure. Failure is a necessary part of the system, a key organ within the organism of innovation. Make friends with risk. Make starting a way of life. Going beyond the point of no return. Leaping. Committing. Making something happen. Have the guts and the passion to ship. Be prolific: make shipping a habit.

The tools to build new business, charitable organisations, artistic projects are easier to access (and cheaper) than ever before. The most scarce factor in new products/services now is leadership: people with the guts and passion to act on their ideas and start. Ideas are pretty common, starting is a lot rarer.

Human nature is to need a map. But you must be willing to be the guy who enters unknown territory without a map: draw one and recruit people to act on it. This leadership is a rare quality. People want to be led, they want a map, they are waiting for a leader: be the leader.

Trial and error is the key to forming the map. Improvise in the unknown territory until you get it right. Start don’t wait. If you fail and realise that you will never get the idea to work: stop, shrug your shoulders, and try something new. It is part of the game. Starting is a game and you are going to lose a lot. But by actually playing the game you will win a lot more than people who never get round to it.

Soon is not as good as now: pick up your phone, send an e-mail, buy that book from Amazon: begin your journey this second. Do it when you are passionate about your new idea, when you have momentum. Say “yes! Let’s do it now!”

Are you using Twitter right?

It’s important to be a trusted source in your chosen niche. How do you achieve that? Be connected to the people that matter, people who are respected in that universe. Add them on Twitter and @respond to them. Comment on their blog posts. Get involved in their online community. Try and get them to tweet/blog/link about you.