Dave Trott

Dave Trott is the East London adman who trained at New York's Pratt Institute, came home to Boase Massimi Pollitt, and co-founded the agencies (Gordon Gold Trott, then BST) behind some of British advertising's most-remembered work — the Toshiba 'Hello Tosh' campaign and Holsten Pils among them. His books — Predatory Thinking (2013), One Plus One Equals Three, Crossover Creativity — and Campaign column distilled four decades into parables that fit on a page.

His famous arithmetic — roughly 4% of advertising is remembered positively, 7% negatively, and 89% isn't noticed at all — so impact is the entry fee, before persuasion gets a turn; predatory thinking — reframe the problem so the competition is fighting the wrong war; creativity is problem-solving for people who don't care about your product, in language a London cabbie would use; and the brief's discipline — one thought, said memorably, beats five said adequately.

In feeds where average scroll-past time is measured in fractions of a second, his 89% problem got worse, and his cure — be impossible to ignore first, communicate second — got more valuable. His parable style also quietly reformed marketing writing itself: concrete stories, short sentences, one lesson. The best practitioners' newsletters are Trott homages whether they know it or not.

Born 1947 in Barking, East London, a docker's son; a Rockefeller scholarship took him to Pratt in New York, and Carl Ally's agency philosophy — advertising should hit like a punch — came home with him to BMP in 1971 and the agencies he co-founded after.

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