The origins of our oldest games lie in war.
But what happens when those games are no longer needed because the way wars are fought has changed?
The game evolve into arts. The emphasis shifts to fun or aesthetics over brutality and victory-at-all-costs.
Just as the castle and knight are no longer anywhere to be found in today’s theatres of war, and chess geniuses have figured out ways to win matches that would never have worked on the ancient battlefield, most martial arts have traded martial effectiveness for more artistic notions like spirit and style.
Wander into any kendo dojo or fencing school today and you’ll witness smoothly executed techniques designed to score points, gracefully elegant forms executed with ritual perfection, and beautiful displays of grit and determination. But when the swords are sheathed and bows exchanged, you can’t deny that there’s a lot missing from a real fight.
Watch videos of HEMA practitioners against modern-day fencers, or modern kenjutsu practitioners against kendoka, and you’ll see what I mean. Techniques for real damage vs techniques for points.
And you see this everywhere across the martial arts world. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, once perfected by the Gracies and established as the ultimate fighting system, is evolving a series of highly-effective sports techniques that exploit no-striking rules and illegal techniques. Meanwhile in boxing, prizefighters are breaking their hands in bare-knuckle contests because of their reliance on sports-mandated gloves.
Which is all well and good during times of peace when once-lethal skills must find new applications for fitness and fun. But what about the individual who might actually have to use them for their intended purpose one day?
In the traditional advertising world, we’ve adapted our creative into art. We strive for standards of aesthetic beauty and creativity that—like the spirited kendoka who scores with a stroke that moves too fast for the judge to see—may not actually hit.
Meanwhile in the upstart digital world, agencies have also found ways to fudge effectiveness. Sure, the ad may have reached a bazillion eyeballs and generated endless follows and likes, but like the fencer whose rapier thrusts are designed solely to set off sensors—they fail to pierce their target’s heart.
Unlike in martial arts, audience applause and judge satisfaction are not enough. Your skills actually have to work. And sooner or later the client either notices their retainers are only good for display purposes, or they go down in defeat.
What to do? What to do?
While the agency he founded has since seemed to be even more obsessed with winning awards than its peers, David Ogilvy himself rarely had that luxury. Working as a propagandist during the Second World War, his ideas had to work because the very existence of his home country depended on it. After the war, he founded Ogilvy & Mather on the principle that, “If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.”
A way of thinking that Japan’s most renowned warrior, Miyamoto Musashi, might have agreed with. When he thumbed his nose at more refined schools of swordsmanship by charging savagely into bouts with dual swords or—even more barbarically—a whittled-down beam of wood, he was using creativity in much the same way:
To win.