Transcription
When working on British Airways, we couldn't understand why the flights from London City to JFK weren't insanely oversubscribed cuz it's a tiny little airport. You turn up, you only have to check in about 25 minutes before your flight leaves. It's an all business class Airbus A317 with I think 32 seats on it. So, boarding takes about 2 minutes. There's no fighting around for luggage space and you take off and get to New York and you actually clear customs in Shannon. It's a brilliant proposition. And yet people were very slow to catch on to it and we couldn't really understand why.
And then we realized every single bit of business travel is booked and it's an all business class flight. It's booked between two intermediaries. There's a travel agent and there's a personal assistant. Their interests are not aligned with the interests of the person doing the traveling. They don't know this. It's a deep-felt human instinct called defensive decision-making, which is I will take the decision that in the worst in the event of the worst-case scenario involves least blame accumulating to me.
Now, think about it this way. You're booking for your slightly irascible and hypertensive boss a flight to New York. You book him a flight out of Heathrow and the flight's delayed by 2 hours. He blames British Airways. Do something original, however, and book a flight out of London City, he blames you. Nobody ever shouts at their assistant and says, "The hell were you thinking [music] booking me a flight from the world's second busiest international airport, you weirdo, okay?"
Do something new and original and different, put your head above the parapet, and this explains why selling bold creative work is so difficult. If you do boring advertising and it fails, you're unlucky. If you do brave advertising and it fails, it's all your fault.