The Way I See It: Rory Sutherland

Rory Sutherland, 45, is vice-chairman of the Ogilvy Group UK and current president of the IPA. He joined Ogilvy & Mather as a graduate trainee in 1988, working as a planner before becoming a junior copywriter. He tells Diana Goodman about how rich people get too fussy, the relationship between maths and advertising and the joy of documentaries about serial killers.

I would describe myself as a strange, occasionally useful misfit in the London advertising industry.

My paternal ancestors bizarrely left the highlands of Scotland to seek their fortune in the South Wales valleys. Stranger still, they partly succeeded. I am only a quarter Scottish – and am more Welsh than Scottish – but I do feel myself to be a Celt.

My wife is English and routinely baffles me with her odd Saxon behaviour, for instance eating food that isn’t brown. I also hate hot weather; I wish they would hold Cannes week in March or in Stockholm.

My late mother and father together ran a small business – buying, restoring and renting property. It still fascinates me how many people in creative departments are obsessed with property speculation. Perhaps the skills required are similar – an eye for “what could be” rather than “what is”.

In some ways, though, growing up in a small family business is terrible preparation for working in advertising. Even after 40 years, I still cannot really comprehend the narrow preoccupations of many people in our client companies – or agencies. When it is a family business you think of it as an entirety, not through the lens of one department or another.

I was particularly blessed in that both my parents worked at home and hence were always around. However, it ill-prepared me for the world of work because there was no nine-to-five routine. My father would typically rise at about 10.30am and then work into the small hours of the morning – a routine I still prefer myself, when I can get away with it. I sometimes claim that I overslept my way to the top.

Was I a happy child? Yes. One great thing about the Welsh Protestant revival is that there are very few priests around.

My first memory is my grandmother’s telephone number: Gobion 372 (Gobion is a place). It is quite fun to go through your life seeing how many phone numbers you can remember. My advice: Don’t fight the Asperger’s, make it work for you.

I went to the local Haberdashers’ School in Monmouth, a former grammar school that went independent after the fairly senseless decision to destroy most grammar schools in Britain. I was lucky, not only in the choice of school but also in the period I went there. Not to say it isn’t good now, but my contemporaries and I were fortunate to see the tail-end of a generation of schoolmasters who had taken up teaching after serving in the Second World War. The Americans speak of the Greatest Generation. I think they are right to use this phrase.

The school helped with my getting into Cambridge. I don’t think I sailed in, to be honest. Equally it was a difficult year, since the shift from “seventh term” to “fourth term” entry meant you were up against double the usual number of applicants.

I briefly trained to be a teacher, since when you study classics, it is the only obvious career path that presents itself. And I did – indeed still do – enjoy teaching.

I gave it up because I suddenly realised I was heading for a life spent entirely in educational institutions. Too narrow, I thought. And what had made the generation of older schoolmasters impressive at my school was that they had done something else beforehand – even if it was just shooting at Germans. Also – let’s be candid here – I noticed that teachers have dreadful cars.

Oddly, it was a single agency – not a single advertisement – that made me go into advertising. From the early 70s, my brother and I fought each other every week over who first got to read The Sunday Times colour supplement. We were fighting not to read the articles but to read the advertisements – in particular, the advertisements from CDP (though, obviously, we didn’t know it at the time). It is an act of moronic barbarism that this kind of urbane, well-written press advertising is no longer produced in this country.

In 1988 I applied to about six agencies’ graduate training courses. The only one that took me was what was then Ogilvy & Mather Direct, now OgilvyOne.

During the early stages of the training scheme we all got to spend a fortnight in the creative department. It was a ‘Road-to-Damascus’ moment. I knew I wanted to move there soon.

Just one anecdote illustrates the experience of working with Microsoft early on. For about three months, every time there was a Microsoft brief you had to spend the first five minutes explaining who Microsoft were: “When you turn on your computer, you know it says MS-DOS loading? Well that MS kind of stands for a company called Microsoft...”

By a happy accident, my brother was (and is) an academic, so I first used the internet in 1987. I spent the next seven years as a voice crying in the wilderness, wondering why people weren’t more interested in the possibilities. My art director, Mike Simm (now a vicar), and I did recommend that Microsoft investigate the internet in 1992, suggesting that they bundle a modem with Microsoft Office, so we earned a few smug “told you so” points for that, I suppose.

The internet is the only creation of man that gets deeper and more rewarding over time – I am endlessly grateful for it.

I am not, however, wholly delighted with the path history has taken. In particular, it baffles me that people seem unable to parlay technological gains into enjoying more leisure time; instead, we seem to use technology simply to help us work harder or do things faster.

Americans (who are genetically descended from the most malcontent and restless five per cent of 19th-century Europeans) are especially guilty of this. When you tell Americans that Germans take six weeks holiday a year, they don’t express admiration or envy, but disapproval. Why? Surely the point of wealth is that you can convert it into anything you like – and that should include leisure time, not just a triple garage full of crap from Kmart.

My interests? Reading (the activity, not the town), behavioural economics and gadgetry. Oh, and true-life crime: a good hour-long documentary on the Green River Killer or the BTK Strangler and I’m as happy as a pig in shit.

Right now, I am watching a programme on the forensics of polythene shopping bags and the DNA testing of a dog hair in a Brevard County, Florida murder from 2003. There is, I believe, an analogy between what we do and detective work – the vital importance of the seemingly irrelevant, for instance.

My greatest weakness is indecision.

When I look in the mirror I see the output of Britain’s finest Indian restaurants applied subcutaneously.

Advertising should be very useful, very entertaining or very sexy. Courtier, Court Jester, Courtesan is my rule. Different media do these things differently. Mobile is brilliant at utility; TV at entertainment. Nowadays people keep trying too hard to make TV communicate information or to make the web entertaining. You can succeed this way round, but it doesn’t seem to be playing into the mediums’ strengths.

I hate to say this, but if your TV commercial contains a nice dog or any kind of furry animal, an attractive woman, and a nice song or maybe a funny joke – and is clearly branded – it will probably be an effective ad. All the rest of the propositional crap is just to keep the planners and clients happy and in work.

My interest in the promise of brands sponsoring and catalysing collective action springs from my fascination with economic concepts: the Coase theorem, transaction costs, public goods and the dominant assurance contract invented by Alex Tabarrok.

I am fascinated by the potential of collective action. Phrased another way, the question is: “What would happen if you attached an intelligent cash register to Facebook?” So that 300 people in Peoria County, Illinois, could pay a dollar each to have the graffiti cleared off a wall. Or that a million people could pay ten dollars each for the world’s greatest firework display. Or to fund a film. It seems to me that there is a large role for brands in orchestrating this kind of collective activity.

As a vice chairman, I try to choose deputies as role models. Paul Allen is much cooler than Bill Gates. Steve Wozniak is immeasurably cooler than Steve Jobs. Even cooler still is Warren Buffett’s sidekick, Charlie Munger, who is worth a billion dollars but who regards investment as merely “one among a range of interests”. How stylish is that? To make a billion dollars from a part-time interest.

Other heroes include Samuel Johnson, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. And various behavioural economics gurus: Kahneman, Akerlof, Thaler, Tyler Cowen, etc.

Behavioural economics shows that the way people decide between different options is not a pure, even-handed comparison of alternatives, but is affected (or “bounded”) by path-dependency, context, channel, interface and many other variables. Hence, the conventional focus of marketing is often far too narrow – as though attitude and perception were the only psychological factors to drive behaviour.

That idea is dangerously wrong. If you want people to give up smoking, it may be necessary to tell them that smoking kills them, but this on its own is not sufficient. Other triggers are needed too. Perhaps it is the birth of a child. A milestone birthday. Or even a bout of flu (an attempt to quit smoking stands a much greater chance of success if you embark on it during a minor illness).

Claude Hopkins predicted that in 100 years no one would be able to work in advertising without being a mathematician. Actually, I would rephrase that. I think everyone in advertising should soon have a basic understanding of economics, in particular behavioural economics.

On a lighter note, I also think all children should be taught Latin. Apart from anything else, for boys it is a great opportunity to learn a language without seeming laughably effeminate by speaking it – always a risk with French, I find. Sir John Plumb once said, “There is no greater block to the creative mind than the fear of a solecism.” If you have basic Latin, it means you can write a sentence in English and know for sure whether it is grammatically correct or not. The confidence this gives you is valuable.

Why have I spent my whole career with Ogilvy? Cowardice.

I hate firing people. In fact I hate man-management in all its forms. I am a bit of a Libertarian; if I started an agency it would be on the principles of anarcho-syndicalism.

My worst experience in advertising was in 2002. We had a wonderful global campaign for the accountancy firm Andersen set to run. It was a big idea writ large – around the single word “how”. A week before it was due to run, it was postponed owing to “some events in the Houston office” [the Enron scandal]. In the end, the only creative work to run was a letter I wrote to clients explaining that the company had effectively ceased to operate. The loss of a great campaign, yes, but worse still the disappearance of a remarkable business and brand.

I think what makes my work distinctive is an exaggerated fear of the obvious. This is not always a good thing. I am a little like that man in the film Airplane: “Turn on the search lights? No, that’s just what they’ll be expecting us to do . . .”

I am currently most proud of the recent work in mobile done by Ogilvy for Fanta, IBM and Kodak. Though I have nothing to do with it, I am also proud of the Ogilvy work for the Ford Transit, which hymns the underappreciated contribution made to life by Britain’s van drivers.

Perhaps the best advertisement I’ve ever seen was a most extraordinary advertisement in Punch in about 1979. It was a small ad for the Harris Tweed Manufacturers’ Association which simply said that if you could send them a reference to Harris Tweed in any work on English fiction then, assuming no one had sent them this reference already, they would give you a Harris Tweed hat for free. For the next 30 years (and still today) every time I see a mention of tweed I think of that ad.

I mentioned this ad to Paul Smith at Ogilvy and he said he was fairly sure CDP did it as a small favour to the Harris Tweed folks, who had no money. But what a spectacular use of a tiny budget. It is, in a way, reminiscent of the best of Howard Luck Gossage, whom I revere to the point of adulation. I was delighted to learn recently that David Ogilvy and Gossage were good friends; I was afraid David might have hated him.

I am ashamed at how badly creative people are paid compared to a few years ago. In particular, the disappearance of the group head structure in agencies – largely a wage-reduction measure – will have a very detrimental effect on the future supply of creative directors. This payment by the hour system is an abomination. It means our clients effectively run our businesses, and it has shifted everyone’s focus from the creation of value to the reduction of cost.

That said, I think the business would have less trouble charging for its services if it broadened its remit a bit. At some point in the last 30 years agencies decided it was more important to be fashionable than influential. That caused agencies to obsess over the apparently cool and lucrative business of filmmaking, to the apparent neglect of other vitally important marketing activities. This was a terrible mistake.

I am always wary that as you earn more, money can become a substitute for creativity. If you are not careful, you end up decorating your house expensively rather than imaginatively.

I live near a place called Sevenoaks in Kent, a place so rich that you reach it by exiting the M25 from the fast lane. One thing you notice there is that most rich people use their wealth to become more and more fussy, rather than to become more interesting. For instance, it horrifies me that people will routinely trash and replace a two-year-old kitchen on moving into a house.

One interesting debate. At the risk of being the new Neil French, I have long suggested that a large proportion of wasteful consumption is caused by women (not all women, I add), and their exaggerated obsession with fashion. Yet not a single person will join me in writing about this.

Are there any accounts I would not work on? I would generate work for absolutely anything, because I find that the act of attempting to advertise it often gives an interesting insight into the thing itself.

Where I did have problems was during the dot-com boom where funding was made available for new businesses that clearly seemed insane (a friend of mine knew someone who was given over £1m to start an online landscape gardening business. Eh?). I felt in these cases it was enough to advise against the venture, but to take the money if they still insisted.

It is interesting to see that those categories that people disapprove of generally have more to do with the self-image of those disapproving than any actual statistical fact. [The book] Freakonomics interestingly proved that adding a swimming pool to your house was more dangerous than keeping a gun in it – yet I don’t see any creative people refusing to work on swimming pool accounts.

Having said that, I hate piñatas, so under no circumstances would I advertise anything to do with them.

Politically, I stand squarely on the liberal (libertarian to US readers) right. And for soundly creative reasons. Namely, that competitive capitalism comes up with far more oblique, creative, unexpected solutions to problems than centrally mandated government action.

I am hopeful so far about the result of the British election. There is the possibility that a coalition can take braver decisions than one party alone.

I may regret not having worked abroad while I had the chance. It wasn’t something I wanted to do when the children were young.

I have twin daughters aged eight. Unfortunately they’re non-identical twins, which means they offer no potential for interesting genetic experimentation. But watching their different characters emerge has been a delight. Having twins also causes you to despair of any political system – since they demand complete equality in everything while not being prepared to share anything.

Becoming a father is wonderful. But it is also a vast mental burden. You’re suddenly charged with the responsibility of being around to provide two other people with everything they need: love and stability, plus bloody Nick Jr., Club Penguin and a sodding iPhone.

I’m not sure whether I believe in God, but I prefer him to Richard Dawkins.

I am afraid of dying – especially of dying young. I don’t really believe people over a certain age who claim otherwise. The sudden realisation of mortality that comes at about 40 is a damnable shock – like driving late at night on an empty road and suddenly having a red light glimmer on the instrument panel.

If I could relive my life, I would have spent more time with my late mother – partly so I could accumulate facts about our family that I suspect are now lost.

In the end, what really matters... is the feeling that you have made a difference. Let’s suppose the unit for effecting change in advertising is the Pollitt. In getting UK advertising people to take behavioural economics seriously, I would rate my achievement so far as equal to or great than 0.05Pt. It’s a start.