On Wednesday 19 March, 2003, at the Fort Blair Mayne Camp in the Kuwaiti desert, Colonel Tim Collins stood before 800 men of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment.
A sandstorm had just settled and a battle lay ahead.
Men wiped sand from their faces and waited.
As Collins began to speak, Sarah Oliver, a reporter with the Mail on Sunday, began to write.
“Football’s just a business nowadays”.
Been said in the pub for the last 30-40 years.
Of course it bloody isn’t.
At the beginning of a recent TV show about design, Stephen Fry said: “We’re humans, not machines… Our first response to anything is emotional, not intellectual or functional.”
So design must be “as pleasurable and emotionally rich as possible.”
Form before function, then?
Margaret Thatcher famously described unassuming and largely taciturn Labour Prime Minister Clem Attlee, whose post-war government created the NHS and the welfare state, as ”all substance and no show”.
Or function over form.
Words aren’t always what they seem.
What is the real, tangible benefit your product or service can offer, that your competitor cannot, which connects with the life of the consumer?
Some well known products have claimed as their own a USP other companies could have boasted had they got there first.
Take M&Ms.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan was a playwright.
He was also an MP, owner of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, noted public speaker and poet.
He wrote the most beautiful thing a man ever said to a woman.
“The real fact of the matter is that nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.” Howard Luck Gossage.
Interesting man, Gossage.
Dubbed the ‘Socrates of San Francisco’, he was an advertising writer in the fifties and sixties apparently working in an industry he hated.
On the 16th October 1964, around dusk, new Chancellor Jim Callaghan walked through the narrow passageway linking No.10 to his new home.
He was met by his permanent secretary, Sir William Armstrong, who handed him a thick wad of neatly typed notes which told him the new government had inherited a debt of £800 million.
Appalling economic news was to follow Callaghan like a cloud.
Dave Trott writes a couple of good blogs.
One of his latest posts discusses humour and British advertising.
Here it is (search for the one titled Play your own game): http://community.brandrepublic.com/blogs/dtb/default.aspx
He notes the (not so?) surprising opinion of a French colleague and a former American art lecturer, both of whom thought that historically the Brits were way down the league when it comes to visual creativity.