Grant Leboff: Let’s assume for a moment you’ve done your planning properly and you’ve understood your competitive advantage and you’ve understood what makes you distinct. You’ve still go to put some creative together. We talked about the element of surprise that’s going to work. Where do you find, in your career, the good ideas have come from? Where do people start to grab those, find those?
Drayton Bird: Well I think good ideas come from watching people. That’s where the money comes from. The people who have the best ideas are the people who have the most varied knowledge. I have an art director that I’ve worked with since he left art school and I was really, really pissed off when he got the lifetime achievement awards the Caples in New York before me because I hired him.
I go to stay with him sometimes and we drink colossal amounts of wine. It’s a writer’s lament…. Every time I go I’m staggered at how many books he’s got and I’m pissed off that I only read a few of them, yeah? So to be creative you have to have a well-furnished mind. You’ve got to be insatiably curious about everything especially people. You’ve got to be absolutely obsessed with finding out what the competition is doing. You’ve got to be looking for what’s working not just in your field but in other fields.
David [Ogilvy] said a good copywriter had skill at the art of nitpicking. One of the ways in which you get an idea is you look at something that everyone says is true and you say suppose it’s not true? Just suppose the earth isn’t flat. You’ve got to have a questioning mind. You’ve got to be very, very hard working. I mentioned my partner Marta Caricato who’s a partner in a firm called wealth.co.uk which I think is one of the most brilliant names I’ve ever heard of for a company.
I gave them a little help, not that they really needed it, but she put together a 95-page website in 5 days starting from scratch. All the copy and the layout. Obviously she had a template to work with but she did it all. She’s a hard worker. She used to embarrass me when she worked for me because I would want to go home and she would not go home. She would not go home until midnight, 1:00, 2:00.
David Ogilvy was the same. David had a number of collaborators, one of whom I went to interview. Like you I’m very interested in what makes people good and I went to interview him in Chicago and I said – Joel Raphaelson is his name – wonderful writer. David sent him a copy of Ogilvy on Advertising in a draft with a little note; ‘Dear Joel, kindly improve’.
A really good creative person is never satisfied. Divine discontent, David used to refer to. Well what Joel told me about David, because David worked for a while in Chicago where Joel worked, and he said I would go in on a Saturday morning he said because I’m quite hard working and he said David would be there. I worked through Saturday and I would go home and I’d come back late on Sunday night and I’d see David was still there. I can’t say this does much for your domestic life. That’s what he was like.
When I sold my business to Ogilvy & Mather, eventually – well it was quite quickly actually – I was asked to become the world wide creative director what was then – is now called OgilvyOne – but it was called Ogilvy Direct. I was asked actually over breakfast in New York when I was feeling like crap because I’d just arrived. I’m curious and I said to Ken I said what do you think makes David so remarkable? I’m always curious on what makes people… you know…
He said, “Well I’ve done quite well,” because he was the chief executive of the Ogilvy Group making a lot of money. He said, “I’ve done quite well because I’m very persistent,” he said, “I don’t give up.” He said if something doesn’t work for a few months I’ll try it keep going for a year and I’ll keep going for 2 years before I give up he said but David never gives up. He never gives up. He will keep saying the same thing for 20 years.
Hard work, persistence and also a streak of craziness. Very often the best idea is a thing where you go ‘Ughhhh!!’ and also you look at other people’s stuff and you say I wish I’d done that. I think those things help.
Grant Leboff: That was interesting because you said you got to really understand people and be interested in people. I’m interested because your background and one of the things I know you’ve attributed your success to, is because you grew up in a pub and you’re just interested in people, right?
Drayton Bird: I grew up in a pub. I was a precocious little bugger actually. It so happens that one of my stepchildren has just sent me a treasure trove of letters that I wrote from the age of 7 on at prep school where I hated every minute. One of them says, “I’m sorry I ran away from school,” because I ran away. I was always a rebel. I think, by the way, if you want to be good creatively, being a rebel in some way helps. You zig when everyone else zags or whatever but anyhow…
Yeah I was brought up in a pub and the pub was a peculiar pub because it was in a not very wealthy area. The clientele was very mixed. There was ordinary working man in the vaults, where you paid less, and then in the American bar there were very wealthy cotton magnates. I so I got to listen to both. One minute I’d be – I think I wrote about this in one of my books – I’d be listening to Alec who’s party turn, his friend would say, [in old north England accent] “Alec, tell young Drayton how thou wife left thee”, and Alec would say it was like a religious service it was always the same. “She went out for a loaf of bread and never came back.”
Then I’d be serving somebody, because I started serving before I was supposed to, some wealthy bugger. I can remember I was driven in one of the first Bentley Continentals. These guys had a lot of money these guys in the dying cotton industry. I got a totally different perspective from two types of people. I used to go out with Frank Moores. We used to go dancing at the Ashton Under Lyne, Palais de Dance. Frank Moores was in so much trouble with the police that people used to refer to the Frank Moores’ column in the Ashton Under Lyne Reporter.
At school I was sent away to school when I was 7. Of course I mixed with children of quite wealthy people. I was exposed to very, very different experiences. Also I was unhappy. I was very unhappy at being sent away to school. Somewhere, I can’t find it in one of these books, I think it’s been lost, the very first letter I wrote when I was 7 to my parents. It still has tear stains on it, yeah?
I think being not satisfied, being fascinated. I drive some of the people I know, my domestic partners, mad because I’m always asking stupid questions. Then you see if you don’t ask dumb questions you won’t get surprising answers. Also if you want to be creative you’ve got to read a lot. You’ve got to study a lot… For instance I can’t play an instrument. I cannot sing but 1, 2, 3, 4, of my children, 5 of my children either are or have been in the music business. I’m interested in every kind of music. I’ve seen Louie Armstrong. I’ve seen Count Basie, I’ve seen Ella Fitzgerald. My second wife was also an opera singer so I’m very interested in opera.
I consider it a weakness that somebody I know very well, a lady, is very mechanically adept. I watch and I feel frustrated because I know I’m no use at that. I’m not a complete man you know? It’s a great regret not to … I’m not good at mathematics mainly because my first teacher was a man called Jeffrey Latro Foster. May he rot in hell probably is right now, what a shit. That’s another thing that helps I think is to be excitable.
Again, an American writer once suggested that good copy was the transference of enthusiasm. I can get enthusiastic about the most bizarre. You come along to me with something that I don’t know anything about and say I want you to sell this thing, I’m immediately interested. I’m immediately interested because it’s a chance to improve myself.
So, again, to be any good you’ve got to be intent on improving yourself… I misquoted this and somebody – a lot of people – write to me saying… f*** off Drayton!! No… A lot of people write to me, [saying] that I misquoted ‘the great problem with the mass of men is the poverty of their desires’. It wasn’t actually [what was said] so it wasn’t quite [right] but that’s the problem. It’s a variation of what I said about Charles de Gaulle; Aim for the top, it’s less crowded there’. Ogilvy put it; ‘try and hit the ball out of the park every time’.
There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order to facilitate the readability of the written English
