James Hilton: Make Love Not More, Part II

So, as I was saying: how do we add and not just simply create ads? How do we turn advertising into Addvertising? Authenticity is at the very heart of successful interaction, and I’ve noticed recurring behaviours and attitudes that are consistently exhibited by companies and individuals whose authenticity is central to their success.

They aren’t rules by any stretch; they’re more like reminders, as we all pretty much know them already. It’s just that we forget, either genuinely or because it’s inconvenient to remember them. They are also pretty broad, and because of all this, I call them gists. Gists are more malleable, more adaptable, than rules. I’ve always found that if you give someone the general gist they can make up the rest and are therefore able to be successful in their way – not someone else’s way.

Are you hurting or helping?

There are two types of people in this world. Well, three types. First is the type who divides people into two types of people. Then there’s the second type: energy-givers. And then of course there’s the third type: energy-takers.

Now we all know who the energy-takers are – they’re the ones who sap us of fun. As my daughter Iman calls them; ‘fun sponges’. You don’t want to be around a fun sponge. You want to be around a fun….opposite of sponge… a fun sprinkler. That sounds wrong.

In the same way, there are two types of business, two types of product, two types of project etc. Both of which can be categorised into either ‘hurting’ or ‘helping’. You’ll know in your heart, depending on how well your moral compass is functioning, which category you fall into. The key directive though is simple: if you feel you are hurting, not adding positively, if you know you’re not making people’s lives better by your activities, stop. Just stop. Don’t continue to do it. Then go and do something that does.

Never stop trying to be attractive.

The best way to explain this is to use the seemingly accepted wisdom of ‘new customers only’. Allow me to elaborate: You’ve been with your partner for years and years. The relationship is as safe as houses. Tonight you’re going out with someone else. You’re dressed to the nines, on time and eager to please. The last few times you’ve taken your partner out (and, for the record, that is becoming increasingly less often) you wore some old jeans, a slightly soiled t-shirt, and you were late. They look at you and say ‘Err… What the fuck?!’, and you say ‘New customers only, honey. You understand, right?’

Question: How many seconds later did the relationship end?

Relationship suicide. Now instead of people, turn the format of this conversation into one between a brand and a customer. Why is it, from the brand side, that this is thought to be completely acceptable behaviour? What’s more, the customer side – you – allows it. ‘New customers only’ is the very opposite of ‘never stop trying to be attractive.’ It shows that there is one rule for ‘loyalty’ and a very different rule for ‘new’.

This is wrong, and we all know it. Always being attractive is to understand that no relationship is as safe as houses if we only care about acquiring new, rather than nurturing what we have. If we are always making an effort to be attractive, we show that we always care. The output, the product, will reflect this.

Give more, expect less.

Giving is about being helpful. Being helpful. And then being even more helpful. Then, just for shits and giggles, being remarkably helpful. Because it’s amazing how low the benchmark is for brands actually being of help to people.

Problems arise when brands think they’re being helpful by asking their customers to perform some sort of task so they in turn can be helpful to someone else. This is the current trend of ‘brand charity’ whereby you are asked to do something – play a game, provide your Facebook details, jump up and down – so that the brand can release its funds to the needy. Why don’t they just give the money?

The more you give, the more you will be thought well of. But don’t expect stuff back. As mums always say, if you give somebody a gift, don’t expect one back. You give because it’s the right thing to do.

Don’t compare yourself to others.

Despite what fat opera singers say, comparison is the route to misery. As soon as you start comparing yourself to somebody else, you’re spending less time with you.

Be the best you that you can be. Of course, notice what other people do and learn from their success and failures. But don’t try to emulate them, because that’s not authentic. That’s them, not you. And the more time you spend concerned with others, the less time you’re going to be concerned with finding your own authentic voice.

Again, throughout all of this, I’m talking about business and product, but weirdly it’s also talking about who you are as well, because you will become your business, you will become your product, so it’s important that these thoughts infuse everything. 

Because if you can find your own authentic voice, if you haven’t spent your life comparing, then you’ll only ever end up being you, which is the best thing that you can possibly be, because nobody can ever tell you that you got you wrong. (I really should package all this bullshit up into a self-help book!)

Listen to the voices in your head.

We’ve all got 20/20 hindsight, which would be amazing if it wasn’t so utterly useless. The trick is to have 20/20 foresight. It does exist, I promise. It’s the voices in your head, and we all hear them. It’s just that they tell you really, really inconvenient things that are going to be difficult to do, or they’re going to upset somebody, or they simply scare you. But trust me, the thing that they tell you, as long as it’s not ‘kill, kill, kill’, is the truth. All you have to do is to choose to listen.

If your loved ones are not happy, it’s your problem.

You will always find a perfectly reasonable argument as to why somebody’s unhappiness is not your fault. It really all comes down to how much you care. We have a duty of care to our customers, to our clients, to our partners, to our families, and this duty of care can at times be very inconvenient.

But never wait for somebody else to come along and fix the problem, because invariably they won’t. This gist is about recognising that success isn’t built in silos. It’s built with collective responsibility and the acknowledgment that a team’s success or failure of its culture, its product, and its reputation is down to everyone on that team.

If it no longer makes sense, move on.

‘No good plan survives contact with the enemy’, so a famous general once said. The idea here is: don’t allow your previous decisions to become dogma. Don’t allow something that you decided a year ago – now that the environment or market has changed – to prevent you from making the inconvenient and scary decision to change.

Don’t stick to your guns. Plan to pivot. Plan to change all the time. When something happens and you have to change, that’s fine.

Learn what you can, make the decision and move on. My grandfather introduced me to the idea of the shit sandwich. We’ve all been served one, and the bottom line is you don’t nibble on one.

Leave the drama on TV.

‘The smallest birds flap the most,’ Ajaz [Ahmed, AKQA co-founder and CEO] said to me once. And that (as Skinny Pete would say) is ‘church’. It is vital to the success of any business that you deal with negativity and drama with complete neutrality. You don’t want the drama in your life. Fun sponges will create drama; don’t feed them.

This dictates that you conduct your life with dignity and honour. It’s the only way to live if you want to contribute positively, if you want to add. It’s about treating people with kindness even though you’re going to need to make decisions that people might not take kindly.

None of this is rocket science; it’s just hard. It’s really hard to live your life like this, to run a business to these principles. It’s really inconvenient to be authentic rather than just saying so. It takes a disproportionate amount of time and effort to create experiences that delight people.

But it’s the only way forward. Because nobody talks about the amazing thing they saw that was an immense effort of labour – it’s always a labour of love. And that, my friends, is Addvertising.