The James Hilton Column: Make Love Not More Part 1

I’m going to be 41 in a few days’ time, and even to me that sounds terribly, terribly old. Fortunately, I don’t feel like a grown-up and I’m told this by my children, Iman and Farah. They say I am the least grown-up of all the parents of all their friends. This is literally the highest accolade that one of your children can ever bestow upon you.

Liberating advertising

I’m in advertising. I guess most of us are in one way or another. And somebody tweeted the other day from TEDx that they were really happy that I was going to be doing a talk (as was I) but they were especially happy because there was an ‘ad man’ coming to St Andrews.

Now, I’d like to say I’ve never been so insulted in all my life, but that wouldn’t be remotely true as I’ve been insulted in many illuminating ways. But although I have been accused of working in advertising before, and advertising is often perceived as a slightly dirty word, I think it’s entirely redeemable. I think we can liberate this word ‘advertising’ and bring it better meaning. A meaning that is far more about giving than it currently is about taking. And I think we can do this by adding another d.

From advertising to addvertsing. Golly, I’m clever.

So what’s addvertising? Addvertising is about contribution: it’s the idea that instead of producing more clutter, companies can market themselves through creating indispensible services, products and experiences that bring people delight and actually make life easier. That would be nice.

But first of all (in my head just then I said ‘I’m going to take a selfie’ – why?!), do you know what the word ‘agency’ means? Now I come from ‘agency land’ and I know some people in agency land, and I’ve asked them what agency means and they didn’t know either. I only found this out the other day.

What's love got to do with it?

If you want to understand someone, you have to love them – even a little bit. You have to love something about them or you have to love their interests or their problem or their dilemma, their vision – anything. And the more you love of them, the more you understand them. And the more you understand something, the more you have ‘agency’ with them. So to have agency is to understand something. I have agency with you. Possibly. I don’t know. I’m going out on a limb. We’ve never met.

Ironically, it’s surprising how few agencies know that.

I believe that the dynamics of understanding and increments of love that exist between you and me, between you and your friends, between a brand and an agency, between a brand and a customer, are all exactly the same. But they don’t seem to be a lot of the time.

We are all brands. Every single one of us. We all know (or we should) that we are judged through our behaviours and our actions. Not our colours or our clothes or anything like that. These are a kind of veneer part of the brand, but not really the soul of the brand. They’re an aesthetic. The James Hilton brand, presented here for your reading pleasure, despite what I might say it is, is whatever you think it is.

I think ‘genius’, you think ‘idiot’. Whatever. Similarly, the mobile brand in your pocket is whatever you think it is. Despite whatever the manufacturer says it is. It is how it works. If it works well – good brand. If it works badly – poor brand.

Depending on whether or not your views align, this may be a good or bad thing. How authentic something is, is the lynchpin of feeling any kind of love whatsoever. Because after all the veneers have been stripped away, how authentic they are means everything.

Authenticity is the most sought-after characteristic in the world, simply because you can’t manufacture it. It already exists in every single person – you just have to find it. The problem is, as soon as we move away from being individuals to being a brand, the first thing to suffer is often authenticity. Why? What changes?

Call me an old softie, but I think it’s love. The love, left untended, goes out of stuff.

Authentic experiences

Think back to an exceptional experience you’ve ever had with a brand, whether that’s online or offline, when the service has been impeccable and where you came away smiling or at least with a sense of satisfaction. Can you picture such an instance in your mind?

I believe that happened because those you were dealing with, the interface (human or otherwise), truly believed in what they were doing. They put their heart and soul into it, they loved it. That came across to you as authenticity. And for authenticity to appear genuine, it has to be genuine.

It’s like a smile or a handshake. We’ve all been given a smile by someone who we know is faking. Or we’ve all been given the zombie handshake, where they’re looking somewhere else when they should be looking at you… I hate that. That does my head in when people do that.

The most forward-thinking and innovative brands on the planet understand this inherently. Many others think that they understand it, and you can see that they think they understand it because these words crop up again and again in their brand manuals. If you’ve ever experienced the startlingly generic joy of looking through a brand manual, you’ll know what I mean.

Authentic isn’t a tone of voice. Love is not a metric; it’s not a tick box. They are both the intangible products of businesses borne of passion, driven by people in every layer of the organisation who want to solve problems for their customers to reduce friction and remove clutter.

Passion and process

Of course, the trick is to make sure that this passion is not turned into a process. Passion, love, are emotional; business processes are by definition rational.

In life as in business, finding common ground between these two opposites is an ongoing challenge. And so, requires ongoing effort. Ongoing effort is usually the moment when most people go ‘Ugh’ and quickly find something less taxing to do. But as far as I can see, there’s no permanent way to address this balance. It’s something people have to tweak forever and ever and ever: within ourselves and within our business.

People love a process, because it’s a rule. It’s something to follow and it frees us of responsibility, and it instils a soporific sense of safety. But people also love passion because they love it when something goes right. They love it when something of worth is created and they want to capture the circumstances surrounding that creation, bottle it up and give it out to everyone else to make sure that it happens again.

But of course, you know where I’m going with this. As soon as we do that, we create monsters – our best intention to create ‘one size fits all’ rules simply doesn’t work.

So, how do we find and nurture within businesses, within products, within ourselves, this authentic self? How do we ensure we’re adding, and not just simply creating ads?

Most businesses are very simple. People, generally, have simple needs. Life, believe it or not, is also actually very simple. It’s just an awful lot of us out there like to make things more complicated than they need to be, and I’m sure you know a few of them.

Getting the gist

In my time on this planet I’ve observed a whole bunch of different behaviours, and I’ve taken note of all of them. The ones that I see repeated, to my own definition of success, I’ve kept. Not so much rules, more loosely gathered bits of paper with scribbles on them. I call them gists.

I certainly don’t think that they’re the ultimate answers to life, the universe and everything (as anyone who knows where their towel is, that’s 42), but they are a way to make life better, simpler, easier, and more enjoyable, and they’re the attitudes I’ve seen proliferate throughout companies and individuals I consider to be successful. (As a by-the-by, my definition of success is the ability to spend the vast majority of your time making a living doing things you love. If you love being a designer, you’re a success. If you love being a binman, you’re a success.)