Dave Trott on Blogomanija: Creativity Is the Last Legal Unfair Advantage Over the Competition
Blogomanija, the biggest CEE blogging conference (sponsored by yours truly, .ME) started a few hours ago and the keynote speaker was none other than Dave Trott, a creative guy, with a creative job, who has quite something to say about creativity.
Trott was born and raised in East London and educated at the Pratt Institute in New York, where he said he learned to be street-smart, the special creative kind of smart which, in his words, enables you to outwitt the competition even if they are smarter, faster, better or richer than you.
But first thing first, what is creativity? Everybody is a „creative-something“ these days, notes Trott, and there are many people calling themselves creative, but who are nothing more but stylistis. What creativity is really, is the last legal unfair advantage we can take to run over the competition.
It should be noted here that Trott is the founder of Predatory Thinking approach and the ceative advertising agency GGT, so it is no wonder that he is an expert on how advertisers can use creativity to their (predatory) advantage. Don’t take it the wrong way, Trott is far from vicious, but he marks that, in life as well as marketing, you can only give 100 percent. If you want more than that (your clients certainly do), you will have to take that extra from your competition. In case of marketing and adverstising, that extra you are trying to get is the attention from your consumers.
Don’t Fuss About a Problem You Can’t Solve- Go Upstream and Find a Problem You Can Manage
That can pose a problem, when your competition is bigger than you and has a bigger budget. When you fell like you are at a stand still and faced with a problem like that, one you can’t solve, what you have is go upstream and find the problem that you actually can deal with.
When it comes to advertising, think about what media you have at your disposal. Your first guess is probably the press, television, digital, social media, but they are just communication channels, according to Trott. The consumer is the core media, your one constant, the one who shares, who makes things viral.
Sure, you have to understand the channels of communication, but what you should really focus on are the simple timeless human truths about how people (your media) think and function. We tend to think in binary oppositions and categorize things in just two categories- things that are alike and things that stand out.
This is something you can use to your advantage, says Trott. Just think about how your consumer sees advertising, when he is bombarded with hundreds of similair messages. They all fall into the same category and you have one in a hundreed chance of getting theit attention. If you dare to be odd, to be different, to make the advert that doesn’t fit- well, then you fall into the second category, and the competition is a lot smaller there.
Advertising Is a Conversation
You also have to think about advertising as a conversation. And every conversation has three simple and essential parts: impact, communication and persuason,inthat particular order. When you have something of impact to say, you communicate it in a way the other person can understand. Only then do you get the chance to persuade them.
In advertising, however, people often tend to ignore communication and jump to the persuasion, a move which is setting your campaign to fail. The key to getting to consumers is communicating things things in the right way to the right people– the opinion formers, the ones who will be your media and pass your message forward, to the opinion followers.
To do that, you need to be creative and capture their attention. You can do that by being different- so embrace that, don’t shy from it.
