Man Of Few Words

I was almost late for my date with Inge. I was really worried I was going to spoil it. By being just a few minutes late. Wouldn't have made any difference.

It's Friday now. I think. It's dark. I have no idea whether it's late night or early day.

How was the date? It did not go well.

I could see the look of surprise and concern on her face from the very start. I'd made things worse by rushing to get there on time. I'd actually run part of the way, which was a really bad idea. I was out of breath and sweating and exhausted when I arrived. But I just tried to set my self-consciousness to one side and act like everything was normal. I guess she was doing the same.

She asked if I was okay. I laughed it off unconvincingly, making a few weak jokes about how my legs aren't what they used to be. She then desperately tried to make conversation while I tried even more desperately to get my breath back.

I gave short answers to her questions about what I do and where I'm originally from, strategically managing to get her talking about herself instead by really playing up my "how interesting" signals. She didn't seem all that comfortable with talking about herself at length, but with a bit of nudging she went into quite a lot of detail about one of those aforementioned apps. I confess I don't remember a thing about it now.

It did work though. I literally created some breathing space for myself, and the more she talked, the more she relaxed. After a shaky (again literally) start, things began looking up. As we munched our way through our overstuffed bagels and sipped our tall, cool glasses of Mama's Own Lemonade, the conversation flowed naturally. Without making it sound like a brag – and it really wasn't – I'd dropped my typical "per word" rate into the conversation, and she'd been genuinely fascinated as to how my career had managed to get to that point.

Even as I was explaining it to her, it occurred to me that I haven't yet relayed the tale of my career turning point in this here book. So forgive me as I delay reporting just how the date turned so bad in favour of yet another one of my flashback detours...

The normal practice in advertising and other forms of commercial messaging is to do an awful lot of testing. Different messages, different ways of presenting messages, subtly different wordings of the same messages, different imagery accompanying messages – the variations go on and on and on. And they'll be tested as often, and in as many different ways, as time and budget allow.

But despite all the time, expense and effort that goes into testing and market research, the risk of a campaign being a spectacular flop always remains pretty high. The trouble is that marketing is very, very difficult and most of the people involved in it succeed more through aggressively projecting their own "brand", both within and among organisations, than through having the slightest idea what they're doing. Hence all the testing, which is more of an arse covering exercise than anything else.

Very few have the talent, understanding and confidence to be able to trust their gut feeling. And even fewer are able to get anyone else to trust it. I am one of those very, very few.

I can't explain why my instincts are so good. I didn't actively train them in any way. I doubt that you even can. Like I said before, in some ways I'm just a natural.

But I can explain how I was able to get others to trust my gut and, to be honest, there was quite a lot of luck involved.

Basically, my gut proved more reliable than hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of testing and research. It's rare to pull this off even once. But if you manage it with two major clients back-to-back you become a kind of commercial copywriting Jesus.

The first of the two clients was Carnival, the instant coffee brand. They were among the market leaders in the UK, but the meteoric rise of coffeehouse culture in the early noughties was stamping all over their profits. The experience economy was kicking their arses and they didn't understand it at all. I told them that. And I made two proposals, both of which emphasised the experience of drinking their shitty coffee: