140 Character Interview with Dave Trott


I had the great pleasure to interview one of adland's greats, Dave Trott, the creative director of Chick Smith Trott. To mix thing up a bit, I interviewed him on Twitter, which meant that his answers needed to be 140 characters of less. I saw Adweek's Brian Morrissey do this a few times on his Twitter stream, so I thought I'd give it a try. I think it went pretty well. You can judge for yourself:

Who has been the most influential person in your life?
I could list loads, but to keep it short John Webster. John looked at what everyone else was doing to see what to be different to, what to do the opposite of, what conventions to break.

Tell us about everything you know about Paul Arden in 140 characters.
It was better to be wrong and interesting than right and dull. Safe, boring and risk-free were a waste of one's time on the planet..

Heard you are a big fan of Helmut Krone. In the age of realtime everything, blogs and such, can unsung heroes still exist?
You define yourself by your heroes. You take a little bit from everyone you admire and the way you put it together is what becomes you.

East London. Self-taught. Successful. Are you the Alan Sugar of advertising? (Does he think West Ham won the World Cup?)
Hurst, Peters, Moore: learn the lesson of 66. But as for Alan Sugar, I think our ads were better than Amstrad. You're fired.

Today is (sadly) the 10th anniversary of the passing of David Ogilvy. What are your thoughts?
When I trained in New York you were either Ogilvy (last of the Mad Men) or Bernbach (first of the new wave) personally I was Bernbach.

Ok, so what differentiates the Mad Men from the new wave? Creativity vs the hard sell? The arrival of TV? Something else?
Exactly, creativity started with Bernbach. Talking to people as if they were intelligent versus talking to them as if they weren't.

TED or Davos?
TED every time: if you're creative it's better to be interesting and wrong than dull and right.

I’ve read your blog and can’t tell. “In order for us to win, someone else has to lose.”Was Maurice Saatchi right?
Of course, how can you have a winner without a loser? They teach games at school where no one is allowed to win or lose, very useful.

I know you’re a fan of “small” What’s the best low-budget concept you’ve seen lately?
There are two post-its side-by-side. They are peeled of until only one post it note is left. The VO says, "Get a test or you could lose a breast" and removes a post-it leaving just the one.

Dave's blog (which is awesome!) http://www.cstadvertising.com/blog/
Dave on Twitter: http://twitter.com/davetrott