19
Sep
2011
Posted at 06:32
by Dave Trott
When my daughter was young, I asked her teacher why she was getting bad marks in maths. He told me she wasn’t showing the working-out in the margin. She just wrote the answer, so it could be a lucky guess. He couldn’t tell if it was arrived at by the correct method. He needed to see the working-out to check if the thinking was ... More
1
Aug
2011
Posted at 06:59
by Dave Trott
About 3,000 years ago the Greeks were outside Troy trying to get in. All they had to rely on was Agamemnon’s old-fashioned thinking. But imagine if Odysseus had been the ‘Social Media Guru’ of the age. Agamemnon: (gets up and stretches) “This siege has been dragging on for 9 years. Sod it, I’ve had enough. Let’s go home.” Odysseus: (excited) “Not now, we’ve just ... More
4
May
2011
Posted at 04:31
by Dave Trott
One of my favourite TED talks is by Jill Bolte Taylor. She is neuroanatomist, a specialised form of brain researcher. One morning she woke up with a splitting headache. At first she ignored it. What she didn’t know was that a blood vessel had just exploded in her brain. And every second she ignored it, it grew. But she thought it was just a bad headache. And, ... More
14
Apr
2011
Posted at 10:14
by Dave Trott
People are always saying “Why isn’t advertising as good as it was?” Personally I don’t: a) have a clue b) know if it’s true. Maybe people always remember the old days as better. But I just read an article on a New York blog and something went ‘ping’. For the first time I thought “Yeah, that’s the reason. And I never spotted it.” You can check out ... More
14
Apr
2011
Posted at 09:17
by Dave Trott
Lots of agencies used to throw a summer party for clients and new-business. At GGT, Mike Greenlees would hire a luxury tent at Henley for a week. Each day a different set of clients would come along, sit in the sun, watch the boat races, drink champagne and eat strawberries. Frank Lowe used to do a similar thing at Wimbledon. JWT’s version was a ... More
14
Apr
2011
Posted at 08:54
by Ron Kunitzky
KFC is the leading American based Quick Service Restaurant in China with McDonald's on their tale. It's estimated that KFC has over 2,000 locations and McDonalds has just over 1,200. With so many choices in China for easy access 'take-away' food, including the local varieties, it's no wonder that McDonald's has set up a partnership with Sinopec, a gas or 'petrol' station company with over 30,000 ... More
9
Feb
2011
Posted at 02:50
by Dave Trott
I recently watched a TED talk by a professor from The Columbia Business School. I wasn’t expecting much. I was wrong. An elegant Asian woman with a long white cane walks to the podium. She’s obviously blind. She reads from her notes, in Braille. Her name is Sheena Iyegur and her lecture is about choice, and the assumptions we make about it. 1) We think choice is ... More
6
Jan
2011
Posted at 05:29
by Dave Trott
Max Forsyth is a photographer. He was telling me about the time he flew from Israel to Cairo, on El Al. He went to the airport to check in. A young woman checked his luggage. She was very thorough, but Max expected that. Israel knows it’s surrounded by hostile states. Being wary of terrorist bombs is almost second nature. And so she was perfectly pleasant, friendly and ... More
1
Dec
2010
Posted at 06:58
by Dave Trott
I loved the movie, Social Network. When I came out of the cinema I was buzzing. But my son was down. He said he found it depressing, the way Mark Zuckerberg had screwed his friend, and fellow Facebook founder, Eduardo Saverin. I hadn’t seen it that way. What I saw was a movie about what it takes to be successful. It takes a willingness to go ... More
24
Nov
2010
Posted at 02:04
by Dave Trott
My wife is an art director. Recently she went to The Marketing Forum. Being a creative, she expected to be bored by lots of case histories, graphs, charts, numbers. But one client told an amazingly creative story about the birth of a brand. It started when he was working in Belgium. Every day he had to try to sell margarine (butter-flavoured spread) to people who ... More