just another blog pressed for words

One of the greatest books on how to be good at what you do is called Simply Brilliant: The Competitive Advantage of Common Sense by Fergus O’Connell. I read it years ago and it changed they way I looked at my job and how I operated. I think everyone should read it if they are in the business of marketing. It boils all the complexity and mumbo jumbo down to common sense. One of the many great points that O’Connell makes is to expect surprises. Nothing is linear, and things go wrong relentlessly because … because they just do. The skill is to not allow surprises to affect the quality of what you deliver.

Here is a real example:

A few years ago I was involved in a project that required us to shoot a scene in which a Formula 1 racing car lands on an aircraft carrier and a famous driver climbs out. Top Gun meets Days of Thunder. The shoot was complex to say the least.

We had begged permission from the Navy to film on the deck of one of their biggest aircraft carriers. They were helpful, although you could tell they wanted it over and done with as quickly as possible. It’s not really what they are trained to do!

I didn’t go to the shoot, but later in the day I bumped into the Account Director, who had just returned from it. When I asked how it went, he just shrugged his shoulders and said that all went well and they got what they needed. Wonderful, I thought, and carried on.

It was only later, when the creatives returned, that the true story emerged.

As it transpired, all had been going well. The massive ship was moored to the quay; we had got the F1 car onto the decks via a crane; and the first shot was being set up.

It was at this point that something “off starboard” happened.

As agreed, the lady in charge of providing the food for the day had driven her rather old and rusty, bright pink Fiat Panda onto the deck. Imagine this car with about 1,000 buttered bread rolls packed inside, all wrapped in foil.

She followed her instructions perfectly. She parked well away from the million-dollar equipment. All was normal … apart from one small matter of applying the parking brake to said Fiat.

As the camaras rolled, the Director noticed a strange pink square rolling into the shot in the background. It wasn’t an incoming pink MIG. The whole shoot turned to witness the somewhat unusual site of a Fiat Panda packed with thousands of bread rolls, plunging over the side of the giant ship.

The experience of watching it drop into the ocean has been described as happening in slow motion. The trunk of the car opened in mid air, and thousands of bread rolls flew out like tiny silver missiles scattering the ocean for a good 100 meters. The first pink Fiat submarine was witnessed as the car then sank beneath the waves to the bottom of the sea.

Unfortunately, and much to the annoyance of the Captain in charge of the ship, it also sank directly beneath the vessel. Which apparently was a massive problem, as it represented a real risk of damaging the ship.

There followed the second extraordinary incident of the day as the whole ship’s company was offloaded onto the shore and instructed to push the ship weighing several hundred tons. Slowly the crew managed to get the vessel moving, and soon it was clear.

Then the Captain ordered the crane to be used to recover the little Fiat and place it on the dock. The ship was then pushed back into place, and the shoot, although now running late, resumed. Understandably, the Navy took a dim view of the affair and threatened to charge us a huge amount of money for their time.

None of the bread rolls were ever recovered. The ad was finished and went on to become a huge success across China and the rest of Asia.

By the time my Account Director had returned to the office, they had indeed got all the shots they needed. All this for 15 seconds of rough footage, which then had to be treated massively in post-production. But that’s the job. He expected surprises. In fact, he’d seen so many of them that he’d barely thought to mention it. That’s advertising.

A week later the same ship was stationed off the coast of Beirut, evacuating people fleeing the invading Syrians.

The only downside for the Account Director is that he’ll never be able to join the Navy.