Damon Stapleton: Advertising. How do you rob a bank without going into a bank?
A blog by Damon Stapleton, Chief Creative Officer and Founder, Droga5 Aotearoa.
“Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push – in just the right place – it can be tipped.” – Malcolm Gladwell
I will get to the bank robbery question in a second but first baby powder.
There is an old advertising story/myth that I have heard in various forms over the years that goes like this. The people at Lever Brothers wanted to sell more baby powder. In order to do this they got the smartest and brightest advertising and marketing people in a room for a week. At the end of each day a cleaning lady would come in to empty the bins. At the end of the week, after a forest of post-its and incomprehensible white boards, marketing jargon and very complicated ideas they had not really got anywhere. They were stumped. They didn’t really know how they were going to sell more baby powder. The cleaning lady came in at the end of the day as she always did. She could see everybody was a bit down so she decided to offer up an idea.
Why don’t you make the holes bigger?
And that’s what they did.
Common sense.The ability to actually see a problem and solve it simply will always have tremendous value.
And now a fantastic story from Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Revenge of the Tipping Point.
Meet Robert Sheldon Brown and Donzell Thompson known as Casper and C-Dog on the streets of Los Angeles. In the early 80’s they figured out the main problem with bank robberies. You had to go into the bank to do it. So, Casper came up with the ingenious idea of producing bank robberies. He would recruit others to do it for him. And this simple idea let him rob way more banks that anybody had ever done before or since. He ‘produced’ 175 bank robberies which remains the lifetime bank-robbery world record.
Disruptive thinking. The ability to change the rules to create new opportunities will always have tremendous value.
The truth is as an industry we often sell these kind of ideas. But how often do we apply this kind of thinking to ourselves? How much has advertising changed structurally in the last 50 years? An eye is not very good at looking at itself is it?
But I feel we do need to look at ourselves. I would argue that if advertising was a building right now it is not just the wallpaper that is changing but the bricks and mortar. We need to match the external disruption with the same amount of disruption internally. Jack Welch once said when the rate of change inside an institution becomes slower than the rate of change outside, the end is near. A bit of a downer Jack. But if there was ever an industry who can deal with insane change it is advertising. It’s what we do every single day.
This change also provides a massive opportunity. But the time has come to practice on ourselves what we preach to others. To grasp the potential value, we have to see the problem clearly and change the rules that we have come to accept about our industry as immutable.
Look, it works on baby powder and bank robberies. It should bloody well work on advertising.
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