The Wiki Man:

Rory Sutherland

London, 2011

Contents

- Foreword

- Introduction

- Interview Part One

- Interview Part Two

- Reading List

- Stories about Rory

Blog Posts

- Linda Works Miracles in the Kitchen while Trevor is ubiquitous with the cup that cheers

- It's not always good to read certain books when you're too young

- The Medium isn't just the message…the medium is the product

- Let's put sales promotion at the heart of the agency

- Venetia Thompson & Rory Sutherland list the pointless luxuries and trends that will be culled by the recession

- It is wrong to equate the value of something with how much it costs. New technology for instance is cheap, and transforms our lives

- Is advertising the problem? Or is advertising the solution?

- The great unanswered question of the age

- You’re never alone with a Strand

- Why creatives should wear ties occasionally

- Perhaps we were better when we were smashed

- Who make better planners? Planners or creatives?

- Do people in the music industry understand music? And do people in the advertising industry understand brands?

- How many small cars would be sold if advertisements showed them being driven by pensioners?

- Oh shit! My advertising works and I can’t explain why

- It isn’t a framework, it’s a prison

- People will make better choices when their decisions have rapidly visible results

- If there is one country to which you should always carry a laptop, it’s France

- A scientific approach to queueing — just what I’ve been waiting for

- I have just passed a pub in gosport

- The Nintendo Wife-O-Meter

- The Facebook thing — allow me to explain

- Does something that survives for 18 months deserve to be called a strategy

- Once you pass 40, you need to try harder to like things you instinctively hate

- When good marketers turn bad

- 200 years after his birth, will marketers discover Darwin?

- The day the copy died

- Exhibit A in Rod Liddle’s case against Twitter two weeks ago was a painful (but hardly representative) post by Stephen Fry

- Are you a capitalist or a creativist?

- What can we do to make our industry luckier?

- Tweets

- Credits

Foreword

by Will Sutherland

What can I say about my brother Rory? With hindsight, I suppose it’s obvious that he was always destined to do something “creative”. He always seemed to have his own particular way of looking at things. And, from an early age, he displayed a remarkable aptitude for words. One day, in 1971, when Britain was in the throes of switching to decimal currency, it began to snow. “I’m dreaming of white decimal day,” said five year-old Rory, staring out of the window.

He also had a wicked sense of fun. A rather house proud American lady came to live in our granny flat. The flat had a small hatch though which she could pass out her rubbish. Unfortunately, the hatch had a lock that never closed properly. Rory, of course, knew this. Which is how she came home one day to discover a rather flustered live chicken in her hallway. Rory had pushed the unfortunate animal through the hatch.

At school this anarchic approach to life, coupled with his sense of humour, endeared him to his classmates, but had the opposite effect on his masters. On one occasion, towards the end of a Latin lesson, the master wondered whether he had time to begin a new exercise. “How long have I got?” the master muttered to himself as he looked at his watch. “Not long unless you give up smoking, Sir,” was Rory’s reply.

I don’t know much about the world of advertising, except that Rory seems to have done rather well out of it. But it’s a pleasure to be asked to write a foreword for this book. I hope you find reading Rory as enjoyable and entertaining as I found growing up alongside him.

Introduction

by Paul O’Donnell

David Ogilvy once urged people to cultivate their eccentricities early in life. He would have been proud of Rory.

Rory joined Ogilvy & Mather Direct in 1988 as part of our first crop of graduate trainees. He was perhaps a touch more youthful and, to be fair, a little slimmer, but other than that he would be instantly recognisable as the Rory Sutherland of today.

It seems he was born in his mid-forties. Even in the hottest summers he wore a thick tweed jacket and purple shorts, all of which he had almost certainly slept in.

He smoked a pipe and cigarettes and, usually, both at the same time.

But it wasn’t his eclectic fashion sense that made you first aware of Rory; he had a pompous, booming, stentorian voice that made you want to slap him.

That is, until you actually met him, when of course, you became captivated.

Ogilvy was looking for trainee account people and I can honestly say that in all my time in the business he was without doubt the worst graduate trainee we ever hired.

For example, in one of Rory’s first client meetings, the tea was placed on a tray in front of the senior agency person, the client, and Rory. On these occasions it is always the job of the most junior person in the room to serve the tea. As nothing happened, the account lead prompted Rory: “Tea Rory!” he said, nodding towards the tray. Rory replied, “Thanks, I’d love one.”

Rory’s career in account management was short-lived.

Luckily for Rory, Ogilvy had just launched a new discipline called ‘Planning’ and it was felt that perhaps he would be better suited to this more cerebral function.

Our big mistake was to allow Rory to operate a new-fangled piece of technology that we had installed, (he was actually the only person who understood how to use it, so we had little or no choice.) The machine was an early online information system called MAID.

Somehow, you asked it questions and the answers then came spewing out on a continuous-feed of computer paper.

I’m sure Rory did do some planning during this period, but his major contribution to the department seemed to be to sit behind an ever increasing mountain of computer print-outs, typing in random questions, reading sheet after sheet, puffing on his pipe or cigarette or, as I said, sometimes both, muttering “fascinating, fascinating”.

I’m afraid his planning career also came to an abrupt end and he was fired.

This led to a near revolution across the agency, and it was decided to give Rory one last chance — in the creative department.

He never looked back, and within five years he was the executive creative director.

At last, he’d found his métier.

The rest is pretty much history. A highly awarded creative career evolved into a very unusual “creative role,” as a technology visionary, an iconoclast, an industry spokesman, a leading behavioral economist, and on many occasions a stand-up comedian!

We felt that this was an appropriate moment to bring together “The best of Rory so far.” In particular, to celebrate the remarkably successful completion of his presidency of his beloved IPA.

And, as the title of the book suggests, this isn’t the sum total of Rory’s career, it’s the story so far.

His age has at last caught up with his dress sense, and technology with his smoking habit. So with electric cigarette in hand and a new set of tweeds from eBay, he still plays a significant part in the management of Ogilvy.

This forward, of course, can only be a taster of the real Rory. A starter, if you like.

If that’s whetted your appetite, read on and savour the full menu degustation. I can promise you one thing: you’ll enjoy every delicious morsel.

Paul

Interview

Part One

Rory: You may want to shut, just bang the door shut just in case there’s noise outside. This is a marvellous podcast recording device is it?

Interviewer: Yeah, this is something that we’ve been using for our events and things like that.

Tremendous.

Christina: It’s amazing

Yeah, it’s a great bit of kit. It’s my first time using it; it seems to be picking up the levels alright.

That’s for you by the way, the water

Oh fantastic thanks, I’ll need that in a second.

I’ve got a series of questions here. This is my first time interviewing, so you’ll have to go easy on me …

Fire away.

We wanted to know a bit about your time before Ogilvy. We were wondering if there was an event or experience that you think has played a huge part in where you are today, and your understanding of …

Aaah, I suppose going back, I mean before even, you know, education involvement and so forth, aah I suppose my father was a self employed businessman—he both was a small scale property developer and also ran a few small businesses on the side. So there was a kind of entrepreneurial spirit in the household. Which is a useful thing to have in truth, you know, because it just gives you an instinctive understanding of business, how it works, in a way that having a dad who’s salaried doesn’t quite, you know.

So I think that was undoubtedly useful. You don’t realise it at the time but that was useful. It also meant both my parents worked from home. I have inherited a few other things—my father, in particular, is an incredibly late riser and so by temperament I get up at about 10am and go to bed at about 2am or 3am in the morning. I mean, this morning I had to get up about 7:30am to go to this meeting at 9am, but unless I have something that’s unavoidably at 9 o’clock, I’ll do pretty much, as Paul does I think?

mmmmm mmmm…

Doesn’t he? I’ll do pretty much the same thing. You know, I think the working day should start about 10/10:30am and it can go on until 8am or 9am—that’s fine, I have no problem with that, I just don’t like mornings.

ha ha ha.

So, interesting, you know, in a weird kind of way. Whether it’s genetic or not, I don’t know. You probably just pick up habits like this. I find it weird that if you ever drive home late from London through the suburbs, you’ll see places like Bromley where there isn’t a light on after 10:30pm. You wonder what on earth they all do! You know: “well we’ve watched the news, better go to bed now.” I suppose Bromley is probably all weird wife-swapping and deviant sex actually; yes, most probably.

But certain habits like that. I have also grown up with an interest in business and how it works—selling things, you know, how things are sold was kind of an innate area of discussion in the household. The whole family going back, whether they’d be a mixture of Welsh, Scottish or English, farmers, doctors, school teachers, pretty much all of them tended to be in some sense self-employed. I think I was the first person in my family actually to work for somebody else.

Right.

As far as we can work out.

How did they view that? Did they see that as a break in tradition?

No, no they didn’t mind that actually. I mean, umm, aaah, I suppose that’s actually an interesting question—I don’t think they thought: “oh Lord he’s gone and sold out” or anything like that. I don’t think it was as extreme as that.

My education was local grammar school gone independent as a result of 1975 or 6 or whenever it was, whenever effectively grammar schools were forced to go independent for most parts. Interestingly, one influence was doing both sides of something—both of which were useful—A-levels: classics and maths. Which is a bloody schizophrenic choice but actually looking back, are the two things I would say that everybody ought to be taught. I think everybody ought to learn a language —not necessarily Latin or Greek, but a language like German which has case endings, which teaches you the rudiments of grammar because the benefit of that is you can then sit down and write an English sentence and know whether or not it’s okay. You know, there isn’t that weird fear that you get of: “is this sentence actually okay or not,” because if you’ve done Latin or German or one of those, or Russian for that matter, you just have a better understanding of how language works. And I think that is useful for anybody who wants to write quite a lot.

The second thing would be maths, an awful lot of maths is a total waste of time, when on earth in life do you need to know the surface area of a cone? But the stuff involving statistics and probability, I would argue that should be taught as a mandatory at school. People instinctively are bad at it, you know, they’re bad at working out probabilities, likelihood, statistical significance, all that kind of stuff.

You know, you can bamboozle people with fairly shambolic statistics, very, very easily. I think it’s very dangerous thing to the extent that you have a population which is often terrified of completely the wrong thing.

Would you see that as a lack of knowledge about maths or a lack of critical thinking perhaps?

No, I think you do need the maths and actually I can prove that. Even very good mathematicians get some statistical questions wrong. So if you take the famous Monty Hall * problem …

* Monte Halperin, (born August 25, 1921), better known by the stage name Monty Hall, is a Canadian-born MC, producer, actor, singer and sportscaster, best known as host of the television game show Let’s Make a Deal. Source: Wikipedia

I’m not aware of …

Have you ever heard of this?

No.

It’s a very interesting question. You have a game show and there are three doors. You choose a door and behind one of the doors is a Cadillac and behind the other two doors is a goat. I have no idea why it’s a goat or Cadillac, it just happened to be shown this way.

Right.

But the idea is that you want to win a Cadillac, you don’t want to win a goat. Now every time a contestant chooses, the game show host, a chap called Monty Hall who was a famous game show host in the US, will then go: “I see you’ve chosen Door A” and then he’ll throw open let’s say Door C, to reveal a goat.

Right.

Okay?

hmm hmm…

And he’ll say: “right, now, you know it’s not Door C, do you want to change your mind?”

Okay.

Okay?

Yeah.

And the question is, should the contestant change their mind and choose Door B or should they stick with Door A? Actually, your chance of winning, I think, is either twice or 50% greater … for God’s sake, I’ll do the maths later [it’s twice]… your chance of winning is significantly greater if you switch.

Really?

But even some of the best mathematicians in the world, including a guy called Erdös *, refused to believe that you should switch, they believed you should stick.

* Paul Erdös (26 March 1913 — 20 September 1996) was a Hungarian mathematician. Erdös published more papers than any other mathematician in history,working with hundreds of collaborators. He worked on problems in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory. He is also known for his ‘legendarily eccentric’ personality. Source: Wikipedia

Right.

So actually you need to do the maths to absolutely understand this kind of thing. Now what I think is operating here, and this is where behavioural economics comes in, is that we are naturally suspicious of someone trying to help us because if we think about it, we think: “this Monty Hall guy, he really wants us to win a goat not a Cadillac, so why on earth would he do something to our benefit?” And so by throwing open the extra door we think: “he’s just trying to mislead us, I ought to stick with my original choice.” But actually by revealing one of the goats, your chance of winning if you switch is significantly higher. The thought experiment that shows this is to imagine there were 100 doors, 99 goats and one Cadillac; imagine that Monty Hall, the game show host, then reveals 98 goats and says: “Do you want to switch and choose door 97 or do you want to stick with your original choice of door number 1?” You’d probably switch if you see what I mean.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay. You’d go: “Hold on, what’s so significant about door 97, why hasn’t he opened that?” But when it’s only three doors, we’re basically befuddled. Even really intelligent doctors, who can often think quite critically, totally, totally fuck it up. If you have, for example, an AIDS test which has a 99% accuracy rate but a 9% rate of false positives, and the incidence of AIDS in the population is 1% and someone comes in and has a random test without any reasons to believe that he may have AIDS— you know, he’s not an intravenous drug user or similar—if the test comes up positive, given that the test is 99% reliable,

a 9% rate of false positives and a 1% incidence of AIDS in the general population, what are the odds that that chap has AIDS, from his positive test showing? And the actual answer is 1 in 10.

Wow!

If you have 100 people, 99 of them won’t have AIDS but 9 of those people will throw up a false positive. You’ll have one person who has AIDS where the tests will 99% of the time reveal correctly that he does but actually the 10 people who get a positive test, only one of them actually has AIDS.

Now there was a guy, Mlodinow, who in the book called The Drunkard’s Walk, which is about general mathematics and understanding, he himself experienced this because he had a positive AIDS test and the doctor said to him—an intelligent doctor, not an idiot—said to him: “Well basically your chances of having AIDS is 99%,” and the mathematician, fortunately, was familiar with Bayes’ theorem *. He went away and thought: “I think this guy is talking shit” and discovered actually that the odds in his case were very heavily weighted to the fact that he did not have AIDS.

* Bayes’ theorem links a conditional probability to its inverse. Its simple form is:

P (A | B) = P (B | A) P (A) / P(B)

Where P (A | B) denotes the conditional probability of A given B. Source: Wikipedia

This is vitally important because in juries you get cases where DNA evidence is completely misunderstood. If you randomly test the town against a DNA sample, say you randomly test 30,000 people, some will bring up a positive, but there’s no other particular reason to believe that person is guilty. Nothing other than their positive DNA test provides a likelihood that they committed the crime. Maybe this makes it a third more likely rather than not at all, but it is not beyond reasonable doubt.

If you want a really sad case, the Sally Clark * case of double infant cot death.

* Sally Clark was sent to prison two years ago, condemned to life inside for murdering her two babies because — among other evidence — there was only ‘one chance in 73 million’ of the babies, born a year apart, both dying of natural causes. Source: The Observer, Sunday 15 July 2001

Go on …

This is a case where a guy called Roy Meadow *, a patently intelligent, educated guy, said the chances of having one cot death is 1 in 100,000, so the chances of this woman having two is found by multiplying them both together. So therefore the chance that she is not a double child murderer is 1 in 100 million or whatever …

* Addressing the jury, he [Roy Meadow] testified that the odds against two cot deaths in the same family were 73 million to 1. He calculated the figure by squaring the 8,500 — 1 odds of cot death in a normal family. It was as likely, he said, as an 80 — 1 horse winning four consecutive Grand Nationals. This sensational and insensitive analogy was to become a suicide note for his career. Source: Times Online, February 17, 2006

[calculates the problem]

I believe you.

… 1 in a billion or 1 in 100 million? Anyway, it might be even more than that actually. That is absolute bullshit. First of all, because it assumes there is no genetic connection, secondly it seems there’s no environmental connection, for example something leaking in the house. Both of those things are a false assumption, but even if you factor those out then actually he has done bad maths, because what you have to do is to factor the chance that someone’s experienced a double cot death against the odds of someone being a double child murderer. That is also very, very rare. The Royal Statistical Society absolutely sanctioned this guy for giving his evidence and tried to get the woman released. She ended up spending six years in jail, was basically wrecked and died as an alcoholic about two years later …

Oh my God.

… of alcohol poisoning, or virtual suicide. That’s the case where utterly shit statistics by very intelligent people really, really fuck things up. I mean I found it very interesting in the case of Madeleine McCann * that patently, the chance of abduction is very unlikely and rare but also the chance of either deliberate or accidental child killing followed by a cover up is also pretty rare. What strikes me as weird is that no one has investigated the third possibilities, e.g. she got confused, wandered out into the street, was run over by a pissed guy who thought: “I’m pissed and I’ve run over a child” and, you know, half way to hospital realises the child is dead and goes: “I can’t face myself, I’ll bury the child in the woods somewhere.” The fact that that is never considered a statistical possibility when actually, let’s face it, more pissed people drove past that flat that night than paedophiles did, or abductive paedophiles. That strikes me as very weird that we have this completely bifurcated view of probabilities.

* Portuguese police are investigating the disappearance of Madeleine McCann who went missing last night in the seaside village of Praia da Luz in south-west Portugal. Source: The Sun, May 4, 2007

So the wild card option can sometimes be more probable?

What’s odd is I never heard the wild card option even debated. Did anybody see a brilliant episode of CSI * where it turned out that a woman, whilst she was retrieving her bin from the dumpster outside her flat, a car bumped into the dumpster …

* CSI season 2, episode 2: Chaos Theory. First aired October 4, 2001.

… and pulled her …

… and pulled her in! And it was a brilliant case because it was actually an apparent crime where no crime was actually committed. They worked out it was actually just the combination of unfortunate circumstances. It was one of the most brilliant crime programmes — it was the best ever CSI episode, I think.

I think it was a true story, I think it did happen.

Really? What had happened is — there was a bit of tripe — she was leaving because she was being slightly bullied or she had an affair with her professor. While emptying her bin, she dropped the bin accidentally down the rubbish chute which meant she wouldn’t get the deposit back on her room. She goes down in the dark to retrieve the thing from the dumpster and while leaning against the dumpster a car hits it and effectively bangs her into it. She then falls into the dumpster and that’s it. But it was the most brilliant, brilliant thing because to be honest, it was actually what in police investigation of suspicious death probably happens more often than anything else, which is you actually find there’s some innocent explanation for it.

To make the point, I think statistics and probability should be taught extensively.

Rory: You may want to shut, just bang the door shut just in case there’s noise outside. This is a marvellous podcast recording device is it?

Interviewer: Yeah, this is something that we’ve been using for our events and things like that.

Tremendous.

Christina: It’s amazing

Yeah, it’s a great bit of kit. It’s my first time using it; it seems to be picking up the levels alright.

That’s for you by the way, the water

Oh fantastic thanks, I’ll need that in a second.

I’ve got a series of questions here. This is my first time interviewing, so you’ll have to go easy on me …

Fire away.

We wanted to know a bit about your time before Ogilvy. We were wondering if there was an event or experience that you think has played a huge part in where you are today, and your understanding of …

Aaah, I suppose going back, I mean before even, you know, education involvement and so forth, aah I suppose my father was a self employed businessman—he both was a small scale property developer and also ran a few small businesses on the side. So there was a kind of entrepreneurial spirit in the household. Which is a useful thing to have in truth, you know, because it just gives you an instinctive understanding of business, how it works, in a way that having a dad who’s salaried doesn’t quite, you know.

So I think that was undoubtedly useful. You don’t realise it at the time but that was useful. It also meant both my parents worked from home. I have inherited a few other things—my father, in particular, is an incredibly late riser and so by temperament I get up at about 10am and go to bed at about 2am or 3am in the morning. I mean, this morning I had to get up about 7:30am to go to this meeting at 9am, but unless I have something that’s unavoidably at 9 o’clock, I’ll do pretty much, as Paul does I think?

mmmmm mmmm…

Doesn’t he? I’ll do pretty much the same thing. You know, I think the working day should start about 10/10:30am and it can go on until 8am or 9am—that’s fine, I have no problem with that, I just don’t like mornings.

ha ha ha.

So, interesting, you know, in a weird kind of way. Whether it’s genetic or not, I don’t know. You probably just pick up habits like this. I find it weird that if you ever drive home late from London through the suburbs, you’ll see places like Bromley where there isn’t a light on after 10:30pm. You wonder what on earth they all do! You know: “well we’ve watched the news, better go to bed now.” I suppose Bromley is probably all weird wife-swapping and deviant sex actually; yes, most probably.

But certain habits like that. I have also grown up with an interest in business and how it works—selling things, you know, how things are sold was kind of an innate area of discussion in the household. The whole family going back, whether they’d be a mixture of Welsh, Scottish or English, farmers, doctors, school teachers, pretty much all of them tended to be in some sense self-employed. I think I was the first person in my family actually to work for somebody else.

Right.

As far as we can work out.

How did they view that? Did they see that as a break in tradition?

No, no they didn’t mind that actually. I mean, umm, aaah, I suppose that’s actually an interesting question—I don’t think they thought: “oh Lord he’s gone and sold out” or anything like that. I don’t think it was as extreme as that.

My education was local grammar school gone independent as a result of 1975 or 6 or whenever it was, whenever effectively grammar schools were forced to go independent for most parts. Interestingly, one influence was doing both sides of something—both of which were useful—A-levels: classics and maths. Which is a bloody schizophrenic choice but actually looking back, are the two things I would say that everybody ought to be taught. I think everybody ought to learn a language —not necessarily Latin or Greek, but a language like German which has case endings, which teaches you the rudiments of grammar because the benefit of that is you can then sit down and write an English sentence and know whether or not it’s okay. You know, there isn’t that weird fear that you get of: “is this sentence actually okay or not,” because if you’ve done Latin or German or one of those, or Russian for that matter, you just have a better understanding of how language works. And I think that is useful for anybody who wants to write quite a lot.

The second thing would be maths, an awful lot of maths is a total waste of time, when on earth in life do you need to know the surface area of a cone? But the stuff involving statistics and probability, I would argue that should be taught as a mandatory at school. People instinctively are bad at it, you know, they’re bad at working out probabilities, likelihood, statistical significance, all that kind of stuff.

You know, you can bamboozle people with fairly shambolic statistics, very, very easily. I think it’s very dangerous thing to the extent that you have a population which is often terrified of completely the wrong thing.

Would you see that as a lack of knowledge about maths or a lack of critical thinking perhaps?

No, I think you do need the maths and actually I can prove that. Even very good mathematicians get some statistical questions wrong. So if you take the famous Monty Hall problem …

I’m not aware of …

Have you ever heard of this?

No.

It’s a very interesting question. You have a game show and there are three doors. You choose a door and behind one of the doors is a Cadillac and behind the other two doors is a goat. I have no idea why it’s a goat or Cadillac, it just happened to be shown this way.

Right.

But the idea is that you want to win a Cadillac, you don’t want to win a goat. Now every time a contestant chooses, the game show host, a chap called Monty Hall who was a famous game show host in the US, will then go: “I see you’ve chosen Door A” and then he’ll throw open let’s say Door C, to reveal a goat.

Right.

Okay?

hmm hmm…

And he’ll say: “right, now, you know it’s not Door C, do you want to change your mind?”

Okay.

Okay?

Yeah.

And the question is, should the contestant change their mind and choose Door B or should they stick with Door A? Actually, your chance of winning, I think, is either twice or 50% greater … for God’s sake, I’ll do the maths later [it’s twice]… your chance of winning is significantly greater if you switch.

Really?

But even some of the best mathematicians in the world, including a guy called Erdös, refused to believe that you should switch, they believed you should stick.

Right.

So actually you need to do the maths to absolutely understand this kind of thing. Now what I think is operating here, and this is where behavioural economics comes in, is that we are naturally suspicious of someone trying to help us because if we think about it, we think: “this Monty Hall guy, he really wants us to win a goat not a Cadillac, so why on earth would he do something to our benefit?” And so by throwing open the extra door we think: “he’s just trying to mislead us, I ought to stick with my original choice.” But actually by revealing one of the goats, your chance of winning if you switch is significantly higher. The thought experiment that shows this is to imagine there were 100 doors, 99 goats and one Cadillac; imagine that Monty Hall, the game show host, then reveals 98 goats and says: “Do you want to switch and choose door 97 or do you want to stick with your original choice of door number 1?” You’d probably switch if you see what I mean.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay. You’d go: “Hold on, what’s so significant about door 97, why hasn’t he opened that?” But when it’s only three doors, we’re basically befuddled. Even really intelligent doctors, who can often think quite critically, totally, totally fuck it up. If you have, for example, an AIDS test which has a 99% accuracy rate but a 9% rate of false positives, and the incidence of AIDS in the population is 1% and someone comes in and has a random test without any reasons to believe that he may have AIDS— you know, he’s not an intravenous drug user or similar—if the test comes up positive, given that the test is 99% reliable,

a 9% rate of false positives and a 1% incidence of AIDS in the general population, what are the odds that that chap has AIDS, from his positive test showing? And the actual answer is 1 in 10.

Wow!

If you have 100 people, 99 of them won’t have AIDS but 9 of those people will throw up a false positive. You’ll have one person who has AIDS where the tests will 99% of the time reveal correctly that he does but actually the 10 people who get a positive test, only one of them actually has AIDS.

Now there was a guy, Mlodinow, who in the book called The Drunkard’s Walk, which is about general mathematics and understanding, he himself experienced this because he had a positive AIDS test and the doctor said to him—an intelligent doctor, not an idiot—said to him: “Well basically your chances of having AIDS is 99%,” and the mathematician, fortunately, was familiar with Bayes’ theorem. He went away and thought: “I think this guy is talking shit” and discovered actually that the odds in his case were very heavily weighted to the fact that he did not have AIDS.

This is vitally important because in juries you get cases where DNA evidence is completely misunderstood. If you randomly test the town against a DNA sample, say you randomly test 30,000 people, some will bring up a positive, but there’s no other particular reason to believe that person is guilty. Nothing other than their positive DNA test provides a likelihood that they committed the crime. Maybe this makes it a third more likely rather than not at all, but it is not beyond reasonable doubt.

If you want a really sad case, the Sally Clark case of double infant cot death.

Go on …

This is a case where a guy called Roy Meadow, a patently intelligent, educated guy, said the chances of having one cot death is 1 in 100,000, so the chances of this woman having two is found by multiplying them both together. So therefore the chance that she is not a double child murderer is 1 in 100 million or whatever …

[calculates the problem]

I believe you.

… 1 in a billion or 1 in 100 million? Anyway, it might be even more than that actually. That is absolute bullshit. First of all, because it assumes there is no genetic connection, secondly it seems there’s no environmental connection, for example something leaking in the house. Both of those things are a false assumption, but even if you factor those out then actually he has done bad maths, because what you have to do is to factor the chance that someone’s experienced a double cot death against the odds of someone being a double child murderer. That is also very, very rare. The Royal Statistical Society absolutely sanctioned this guy for giving his evidence and tried to get the woman released. She ended up spending six years in jail, was basically wrecked and died as an alcoholic about two years later …

Oh my God.

… of alcohol poisoning, or virtual suicide. That’s the case where utterly shit statistics by very intelligent people really, really fuck things up. I mean I found it very interesting in the case of Madeleine McCann that patently, the chance of abduction is very unlikely and rare but also the chance of either deliberate or accidental child killing followed by a cover up is also pretty rare. What strikes me as weird is that no one has investigated the third possibilities, e.g. she got confused, wandered out into the street, was run over by a pissed guy who thought: “I’m pissed and I’ve run over a child” and, you know, half way to hospital realises the child is dead and goes: “I can’t face myself, I’ll bury the child in the woods somewhere.” The fact that that is never considered a statistical possibility when actually, let’s face it, more pissed people drove past that flat that night than paedophiles did, or abductive paedophiles. That strikes me as very weird that we have this completely bifurcated view of probabilities.

So the wild card option can sometimes be more probable?

What’s odd is I never heard the wild card option even debated. Did anybody see a brilliant episode of CSI where it turned out that a woman, whilst she was retrieving her bin from the dumpster outside her flat, a car bumped into the dumpster …

… and pulled her …

… and pulled her in! And it was a brilliant case because it was actually an apparent crime where no crime was actually committed. They worked out it was actually just the combination of unfortunate circumstances. It was one of the most brilliant crime programmes — it was the best ever CSI episode, I think.

I think it was a true story, I think it did happen.

Really? What had happened is — there was a bit of tripe — she was leaving because she was being slightly bullied or she had an affair with her professor. While emptying her bin, she dropped the bin accidentally down the rubbish chute which meant she wouldn’t get the deposit back on her room. She goes down in the dark to retrieve the thing from the dumpster and while leaning against the dumpster a car hits it and effectively bangs her into it. She then falls into the dumpster and that’s it. But it was the most brilliant, brilliant thing because to be honest, it was actually what in police investigation of suspicious death probably happens more often than anything else, which is you actually find there’s some innocent explanation for it.

To make the point, I think statistics and probability should be taught extensively.

Did your study of maths fuel your general curiosity in pretty much everything?

I love books like Freakonomics because someone takes away an assumption which everyone makes and actually does the statistical analysis, and says: “we’re completely wrong about this.” A brilliant example is that there are lots of people in America who won’t allow their kids to play with the family next door if the family next door keeps guns. Which in Texas is a bit of a problem.

Yes!

The average level of gun ownership per family in Texas is 2.5 Do you remember the Waco incident in that strange Branch Davidian compound where the FBI tried to take them out and there was a major shooting feud that went on for a few days? The average number of guns per person in the Waco compound was 1.5, the average for the State of Texas as a whole was 2.5 so actually the Waco compound was actually a pacifist community for Texas.

Ha ha ha

It was actually a bunch of weedy pacifists! The interesting thing there is that people in the US will say: “you can’t go and play there; they have guns,” they’re too terrified. Yet if you own a gun and if you own a swimming pool, the chances the swimming pool will kill a child is something like five times greater than the chance that your gun will.

Oh, right.

And so, partly it’s simply a question of availability that gun stories get onto the news where swimming pool drownings don’t. You have a bonkers thing that exists over here which is that all train incidents get onto the news whereas car crashes involving fatalities don’t. So a train has only got to derail outside, you know, somewhere or other with nobody hurt, but couple that with quite a dramatic Sky News helicopter picture of a train at a funny angle and that’s a national news event. You can have a car with four teenagers in it absolutely wiped out that would probably — well, no — that might not get onto the national news.

You seem to have an avid interest in trains, from reading some of your blog posts…

“You know, I’m obsessed, I’m mildly, very mildly autistic, so things that are sort of system-based fascinate me.”

Right, okay.

One of the interesting things that advertising can do, which actually we don’t try to do enough of … if you look at Dove — what that brilliantly does is it takes the concept, beauty, where everybody has assumed that it’s all about perfecting this platonic idea of beauty, which incidentally has absolutely nothing to do with — and I’m gonna just put my hat here — this has nothing to do with men and what men like in women or find attractive in women at all …

Go on …

It’s partly due to female competition with other females; it’s partly due to things like gay power in the fashion industry, which means that the bodily ideal is slightly different from the normal male bodily ideal for a fashion model, and things like that. If you look at Galliano *, if you look at the fashion industry and fashion designers, you know, you’d have a 70% gay factor among fashion designers, which is interesting because it patently leads to an ideal which is slightly different to the mass market ideal. The main thing is women competing with women. Now, what Dove did is it just changed the frame of reference.

* In the February incident, a French couple having a beer outside La Perle bar in Paris’s Marais district said he [Galliano] repeatedly insulted them with lines including “fucking ugly Jewish bitch” and “fucking Asian bastard” … He made 30 anti-Jewish insults in the space of 45 minutes, she said. Source: Angelique Chrisafis, The Guardian, 8 September 2011

How do you mean?

This is about satisficing, not maximising. This isn’t beauty as a competitive sport, it’s beauty as a mark of female solidarity: a lot of women feeling pretty good about looking pretty good in the kind of way that women look good, to be absolutely honest. It is interesting to note that the photographs don’t feature unusual body shapes — they’re normal body shapes, but which are unusual for fashion photography. They feature women showing solidarity in a collective way rather than as Vogue does, showing one woman scowling out of the page.

There’s a huge debate about this, about why fashion models always look hostile. One guy’s theory is that actually, if you look at it, Vogue sells clothes by showing them to the target audience being worn by someone about five years younger, looking threatening. This is Geoffrey Miller, at the University of New Mexico, by the way. There’s an element of threat to Vogue which is actually, you know, “this is your competition, this is who you’ve got to beat,” and so what was interesting about Dove wasn’t just the body shapes that were chosen, it was the fact that it was a bunch of women being matey with other women, rather than the traditional beauty model of scowling people looking perfect.

What interests me about trains is you can change the frame of reference: should it be all about speed? To be absolutely honest, unless your journey goes into or out of London, the speed argument’s probably pretty feeble. Take Newcastle to Edinburgh for example; most people who live in Newcastle and need to get to Edinburgh would probably drive, wouldn’t they? London adds a whole different dimension, just getting in and out of central London is a total pain in the arse. But should the frame of reference be comfort or productivity, or the ability to read, rather than speed? By spending a fortune on high speed rail, we’re assuming that the USP of the train is that it’s faster. Actually, door to door, is it? That’s pretty debatable. The USP to me is the table and what really annoys me is that they make faster trains — like the high speed link through Kent for example — but there are very few tables on those trains. If I don’t have a table then I can’t use my laptop, I can’t have a cup of coffee, I can’t have a newspaper; the whole advantage of the train has been practically eradicated.

You seem to have a strong emphasis on making experiences more pleasurable than efficient.

Oh yeah, I think excessive obsession with efficiency and speed is perverse. The engineers like it, you know, China is run by engineers and everything’s got to be big and huge and fast. Well actually, I mean, those Virgin Pendolino * trains can make you feel a bit sick and at high speed it’s impossible to type because everything’s bouncing around.

* The idea of a tilting train became popular in the 1960s and 1970s when various rail operators, impressed by the high-speed rail services being introduced in France and Japan, wondered how they could similarly speed up travel without building a dedicated parallel rail network (as those two countries were doing). By tilting, the train could go round curves designed for slower trains at higher speeds without causing undue discomfort to passengers. Source: Wikipedia

Sure.

I have argued that there should be a Ministry of Detail. We’re agonising about problems like the NHS and education, many of which are totally unsolvable, at least by central government anyway. They might be solvable at a local level or an individual level or whatever, but in truth, if you exclude the poorest 20% of the population, the rest of the population are pretty well sorted for material shit. They’ll probably live until 74 which is pretty good — well, they’ll probably live to 78 actually. Compared to only 100 years ago, in terms of material shit, things like life expectancy, opportunities to travel, entertainment, you’re better off than Louis XIV *. I say excluding the poorest 20% because I think it’s fair to say that if you’re significantly poor and significantly indebted or short of money or unemployed, then actually … one of the problems of unemployment is depression, which then makes it very difficult to get a job and so you get into that sort of spiral thing which is dangerous, but for the remaining 80% a lot of the important things in life are actually pretty good. The trouble with life in Britain is that it’s just fucking annoying — there’s just loads of really irritating things, like those ticket barriers on the tube which irritate the fuck out of me. If you’re carrying a bag and you’ve got a coffee how are you supposed to get through the bloody ticket barrier? And it makes the whole deal undignified, you know, you couldn’t have Brief Encounter as a film nowadays because the bloody couple would get stuck in the barrier.

* Over the course of four building campaigns, Louis XIV converted a hunting lodge built by Louis XIII into the spectacular Palace of Versailles. With the exception of the current Royal Chapel (built near the end of Louis’s reign), the palace achieved much of its current appearance after the third building campaign, which was followed by an official move of the royal court to Versailles on 6 May 1682. Source: Wikipedia

Ha ha ha ha.

You know, I mean it’s so undignified. Now, you know. I think there should be a Ministry that just gets rid of shit that’s really annoying, because actually we don’t have that much of a sense of proportion as human beings. My weekend would probably be just as ruined by some trivial software annoyance or my wi-fi going down as much as if I’d had a really significant problem where I was stranded in a field somewhere.

Yeah, right.

Minor irritations are really worth focussing on because unlike things like health care, they’re relatively cheap to solve and the difference they make to the quality of life may be enormous.

Take Paul Dolan * — he’s a Professor of Wellbeing at the LSE.

* “I have always worked collaboratively and across disciplines: I am driven by important research and policy questions, not by disciplinary silos. In many ways, most of my research has been at the cutting edge of the interface between economics and psychology (loosely called behavioural economics). I have published papers and won research grants with economists, psychologists, philosophers, criminologists and medics.” Source: Paul Dolan from pauldolan.co.uk

That’s a great title.

Brilliant, brilliant. He’s worth meeting because we’re meaning to write a second book together at some point and we’ll get round to it one day. But his thing is that if you ask people with a bad hip how many years of life or how much life expectancy they would be prepared to sacrifice to get rid of their condition, and they’ll say about 20.

Really?

20%, sorry.

To get rid of the … ?

To get rid of a real hip pain.

Wow!

Then if you ask people with bad depression or anxiety the same question, they’ll say about 20%. Dolan’s argument is that these statistics are wrong because when you ask someone with hip pain about their hip, they think about how painful their hip is, but 80 or 90% of the time when they’re sitting down or not doing anything, the hip isn’t painful at all. Whereas he argues that actually depression or anxiety are attention seeking conditions which will flare up without any control. You have no control over when you feel depressed or when you feel anxious, it’ll just actually, you know, just leap upon you and grab you at random, and maybe at an inappropriate moments. He says when actually trying to understand how debilitating a condition is, asking someone how bad it is is bad because they think about the pain. The difference between something which actually intrudes and something which you can control is actually quite significant and he says as a result we spend too much on hip operations and not enough on treating depression and anxiety. Almost certainly right, I think.

In a lot of your blog articles you quote Bob Dylan a lot, “people say they’ll do one thing…” *

* Brownsville Girl, 1986

“People don’t do what they…”, he said, “people don’t do what they say they believe, they do what’s convenient and then they repent,” yeah.

And you also quote Andy Warhol about Coke: “The President of the United States can only get the same Coke as the bum in the street”

Yup.

You have these two quite strong pop references, but intermingled with grand ideas from various economists. It creates some very interesting …

I owe a huge vote of thanks there. When I was at university, one of my contemporaries was a mature student. We called him Gramps, but at the time he was actually younger than I am now, he was 45. He had been in an earlier life, at the age of 25, one of the three people behind the Isle of Wight festivals *, so he actually knew Dylan and was involved in bringing Dylan over in ‘69. And of course the extraordinary ‘70 which I think had Hendrix, the Who, the Doors …

* Sitting cross-legged on a flat bed truck, Marc [Bolan] warbles Tolkein-like fairy tales of elves, magicians and romany soup as half of Tyrannosaurus Rex. The setting is a cold stubble field, near Godshill (where the ley lines meet) to a hippie throng gathered for a now legendary one day event. The first great UK rock festival. Source: isleofwightfestival.com

Wow.

He was a brilliant influence because he was the first person I met who was massively into high culture and into pop culture. He had this diverse music collection, which is much more common now, but in 1984 to have a load of classical recordings and a load of Dylan and Hendrix was unusual. This guy was a real polymath and had very, very broad taste. He was also a businessman who was both a bit of a hippie and a bit of a Thatcherite.

Another one of the things I would support, as well as statistical teaching, is having quite a few mature students. It’s really, really good to have people who just have … you know, I mean he taught me really useful stuff. He’d been through various times in his life hugely rich, and then other times less rich, it was bizarre, we shared a student flat with him, you know, and it was like a student flat but he had a couple of pieces of furniture worth 40,000 quid, ha ha ha … it was a weird time.

But he taught me things like, you know, what you’ve got to remember is that hotels, five star hotels, look expensive and they are expensive if you stay there, but they are not much more expensive to have a cup of tea in than anywhere else. But he was also completely eclectic. He was studying architecture, and he was also fascinated in Buckminster-Fuller *. One of the things I’ve learnt from him is the most interesting shit that’s happening in any field is not in any field, it’s actually in the interplay between different fields.

* R. Buckminster Fuller was a renowned 20th century inventor and visionary born in Milton, Massachusetts on July 12, 1895. Dedicating his life to making the world work for all of humanity, Fuller operated as a practical philosopher who demonstrated his ideas as inventions that he called “artifacts.” Fuller did not limit himself to one field but worked as a “comprehensive anticipatory design scientist” to solve global problems surrounding housing, shelter, transportation, education, energy, ecological destruction, and poverty. Throughout the course of his life Fuller held 28 patents, authored 28 books, received 47 honorary degrees. Source: The Buckminster Fuller Institute, bfi.org

That’s becoming more and more appreciated in academia now where you have things like the Santa Fe Institute * which is multi-disciplinary. In defence, the Cambridge College and the Oxford College system as, indeed, happens at St Andrew’s and Durham as well, is very good for that reason. Because you don’t hang out with a load of other classicists. You know, at Cambridge I suppose my friends from college would have been a few modern linguists, a couple of historians, four mathematicians, a couple of architects, an anthropologist, etc. You know, a total mix of people who all hung out together. I think that’s hugely beneficial. I think actually that’s the best thing to take from British universities; the rest of the teachings you can take or leave but the college system is really smart, you know, it’s a really, really good idea to bundle people together. If I had spent three years hanging out with classicists it would have been daft.

* The Santa Fe Institute is one of the world’s few research centres devoted to the study of complex adaptive systems. Founded in 1984, the SFI is a private research and education centre that is highly interdisciplinary, providing an environment in which scientists from diverse backgrounds can learn from each other. Source: exploratorium.edu

In one of your posts you talk about how the working environment can get very, very dull if we’re all sat with people from the same department. If you don’t mix you come up with very predictable results.

I think planning and creativity should work in parallel, it should be part of a process of problem solving just as when the police solve a crime. You don’t say: “we’ll do the forensics first then we’ll do the DNA analysis, then we’ll do the house to house enquiries”, you look for a lead somewhere and you use whatever you can find. That’s another influence. Someone asked me at the conference in Berlin what my two influences are, and I said stand-up comedy and crime-fiction (and true life crime.)

I’m fascinated by humour and stand up comedy because it’s vital to advertising in that the things you can say entirely depend upon how you say them. There are comedians who say things that are offensive or abusive —I don’t know if you’ve seen that Stewart Lee * stand up gig in Glasgow where he basically insults the Scots mercilessly but gets away with it because he does it in such a clever way? Have a look on YouTube.

* Youtube — Stewart Lee ‘Identity’ http://youtu.be/B4-S8n8-9RU

I will.

He calls Braveheart a paedophile …

How do you get away with that in Glasgow?

Then there’s this fantastic challenge and it’s just brilliantly, brilliantly done, ha ha ha! “I discovered I was adopted but I am actually…” he describes himself as Scotch deliberately to wind up the Scottish who actually hate being called Scotch, “ … which explained of course my deep craving for shortbread, offal and heroin”, ha ha ha! It’s a complete insult but it’s done in such a brilliantly oblique way. Take the economist ad —“‘I never read the economist’—Management Trainee aged 42”—it’s a very boring proposition. It’s “read this magazine and you’ll be more successful at your job”, but by saying it in an oblique and funny way, it’s perfectly okay to say it. Particularly in England, where people are incredibly oblique and indirect, you have to use humour as a way of actually saying what you want to say to some extent, because you can’t say anything directly.

The true life crime thing is simply that just as in a crime investigation, when you research people and ask them to explain, describe or give the reasons behind their actions, they lie. Not like crime in the sense they are lying intentionally to get off the hook but they don’t know the reason why they do this thing. They may not even have words to describe, or even be aware of why they did it, so they construct a story that makes sense of their actions.

That true life crime thing really, really fascinates me as well. I’m a terrible misery, I spent most of Christmas being absolutely fascinated by the Joanna Yeates * case. Which is, you know, “why did he move the body?” It’s a really interesting question.

* The couple pointed out that some parents — including those of Madeleine McCann — never get the chance to bury their child, and said they felt almost ‘lucky’ to be in a position to do so. IT consultant David Yeates said, ‘We keep reminding ourselves that we are not unique and this helps in some way, but we are very said for others who have been through it as well. Source: Mail Online, 1 February 2011

Actually I think he just panicked didn’t he?

But it’s an interesting question. Would you be more likely to move the body if you lived in the same house and therefore you wanted to make it seem as if the crime had happened elsewhere? Or, if you’d been a stalker from the street, would you have bothered?

No, you wouldn’t have done, would you?

No, you see what I mean? Maybe the intention was that he was going to hide her more effectively. The other thing that fascinates me with true life crime is … obviously there’s a murder in it which is not representative … but because of the necessary investigation you get a completely detailed description of someone’s behaviour and actions over a period of time. Obviously someone gets killed, which is terrible, but it’s a rich source of anthropological detail. I mean, why did she … is this just how women shop? No bloke would have done this … she went into Waitrose and didn’t buy a pizza and didn’t buy any cider, then on her way home she took a considerable diversion and then went into one shop to buy cider and another shop to buy pizza.

That’s right.

I can’t wait to discover what actually happened. Did he meet her and offer her a lift?

I don’t know.

If she was walking …

Where did the pizza go? Did they find it?

Didn’t they find the box?

Well, that was the question.

Where was the pizza?

She hadn’t got her shoes, she can’t have walked far so either she was abducted forcibly or was murdered somewhere within very short range of her flat. It was a bloody cold night if you remember it, you wouldn’t have walked more than about 20 yards in your socks. Had she just popped round?

Or did she open the front door to …

They spoke to the Landlord upstairs, right?

Yeah.

They let him off? He was nothing to do with it?

That was a terrible gaffe, surely he’ll sue and get quite a lot of damages [he has]. It’s very similar to this awful case with the treatment of the Milly Dowler * family, where the defence effectively, you know, put the family of the girl through absolutely appalling treatment.

* Mark Lewis said police told her parents that Glenn Mulcaire hacked into her voicemail while she was missing. The Guardian has claimed he intercepted messages left by relatives and said the NoW deleted some, which gave her parents false hope she was alive. NoW parent firm News International said the development was of “great concern”. The family of Milly Dowler were offered £3m in compensation. Source: BBC News, 4 July 2011

Yeah, horrible.

That was a disgusting thing. I would have been fairly sympathetic in that defence in fairness, but the guy was already in for double murder anyway, okay, so he wasn’t a blameless individual …

No.

Therefore, okay, you might argue that it’s the job of the Defence to provide whatever doubts might be possible and claim that she just ran away, but then since her body had been found, I think it was clear that she had been murdered the likelihood it was an accidental death was pretty much nil.

It’s interesting hearing you talk about this, did you ever consider going into the police force?

Not really, no, I must admit.

You went to Christ’s …

Christ’s College Cambridge * and did classics …

* Charles Darwin’s student bills have recently been discovered at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where Darwin was a student from 1828—1831. Source: darwin-online.org.uk

Right.

I did classics then, and my brother was a mathematician. I did maths for A-level. There’s a guy, a great guy who you must meet who was kind of the creative director of the Metropolitan Police.

The creative director?

I’ve completely forgotten his name, he came to see me the other day, he’s now working partly on that Radio 4 programme, the Museum of Curiosity with John Lloyd. His whole thing was he was director of creative solutions for the Met, and the point was that we spend an awful lot of time trying to find people who have committed crimes and we invest a tiny amount of time trying to prevent crime in the first place.

Just to give an example, he found this park where winos and druggies hung out at night and just fell asleep on the benches. About four times four times a week he’d be called out by residents saying that the druggies or the alcoholics had started a fight, you know, “can you come and sort it out, please”, and he went round and he looked around the park for a bit and he noticed the gardener. He just said to the gardener: “when do you water the grass?” and the guy says: “first thing in the morning. You can’t do it in the middle of the day, you’ve got to do it either morning or evening.” He asked if he could change it so he did it in the evening instead, and make sure he sprayed all the benches really wet, then the druggies wouldn’t go and sleep on them because they’d be soaking wet.

That’s a great solution.

His belief was … I mean he realised … you know, he went to housing estates where huge amount of crime arose and he realised that there was no solidarity between ethnic groups and no solidarity between age groups at all.

Right.

He said: “okay what we’ve got to do is find a hobby in common and it’s not always easy, but actually one thing about this place, everybody loves their dogs,” so he just staged a dog show.

A dog show?

One where you had a mixture of hard core drug dealers and kind pensioners, you know, all actually displaying their dogs and getting them to do the odd trick.

He worked within the …

He worked within the community to actually change the whole combative spirit between racial and age groups.

That’s great.

There’s gardening now, a lot of gardening

What, actually community gardening?

Yeah.

“His idea took lateral thinking and creative thinking and applied it to bigger social problems. I still think there’s a huge opportunity for that kind of thing.”

Do you think that’s something that people should be doing more of within the creative industry, rather than leaving it to the public sector to initiate those projects?

It’s interesting because the one thing he said is: “I have no budget.” The problem was partly that the Met had to keep their existence secret, there were only about three of them. He’s Cornish originally. His dad was a policeman in Cornwall and he joined the police force because of a bet. His dad said: “I’ll give you 50 quid you won’t last three years in the police”.

Ha ha ha.

The interesting thing was that they had to keep it a secret, because if the press got on to the fact that they were hosting a dog show, they’d get into “instead of catching the real criminals …” you know, whereas arguably this prevents more crime than vastly more expensive activities like going round and having to put people through the courts, which costs a bloody fortune.

How do you feel about the way the media report stories, and perhaps make it difficult to execute quite interesting solutions to problems? Is that something you think happens a lot?

I think the media often has an influence which is not intentionally propagandist, but there are some terrible things that the media has done which I think have been incredibly damaging socially. The worst one of which is treating all property price rises as if they’re good news and property falls as if they’re bad news. Of course, actually, property price falls are bad news for only two groups of people: the first are those that go into negative equity, which is a problem because you can’t move house, the second group are people who are planning to downsize — aged about 65 — and move to a smaller place and realise the capital from their main house. For everybody else, a property price fall is either neutral, or it’s beneficial. It means you can move to a bigger house for less. This seems to be a case where the media is just assuming that property is this great wonderful thing. All that property porn, you know, about people buying a flat, doing it up and making thirty grand, it’ll just turn the whole bloody country into a nation of speculators, all the while making property completely unaffordable for anybody under 40. The average age of a first time buyer in the Thatcher era, about ‘84, was 25, it’s now 39.

Is that right?

It’s a massive injustice. I’m lucky to say this because I’m on the cusp, you know, I’ve made a bit of money out of it, but there are people who are 15 years older than me who made half a million or whatever, insane amounts of money. All it seems to have done is just take money from the young and give it to the old. That’s the net effect of the whole thing.

Photographer: Sorry to interrupt, would it be okay to go out on the balcony?

Ah, no unfortunately not. I’d love to, but …

I meant me, not you.

No, nobody can unfortunately because none of the windows open.

Ah okay.

The reason you can’t get out there is … we tried to do it because Gary was a very keen smoker, our former chief executive, only to discover that the insurance cost was absolutely insane.

That’s right.

So there are no opening doors unfortunately.

No problem.

We couldn’t even sneak you out.

I wanted to ask you a bit more about your time at Cambridge. How was your experience there, how do you find …

I met my wife there. So that was fairly significant. And a bunch of friends who are still good friends, you know, eight or nine people who are still very good friends years later.

Did your education influence what you find yourself doing now?

Directly, not at all. I nearly became a teacher. In my fourth year in Cambridge * I was actually a trainee teacher, and then I suddenly panicked about two months in and realised that if I continued, I’d just spend my whole life in educational establishments and never actually see anything else.

* I live in Cambridge and want to warn people about poor nightlife in Cambridge. I constantly see disappointed stag and hen parties who have such an important night out ruined. Source: ‘ster100’, Trip Advisor

Right — depressing…

I started applying for advertising graduate jobs, and then I think I was waiting in the Ogilvy reception and someone came in saying something like: “I’ve had a bad trip back, I had to change planes in Addis Ababa *” or something like that. I remember thinking: “gee this is a bit more exotic than teaching.” The classics thing … it got me interested in writing, interested in words and interested in persuasion I suppose. There were things I studied, like classical philosophy, which are interesting and useful conceptually. You know, the study of philosophy is useful. I suppose 20 years on that’s still useful. There were the interesting conversations that you had, as I said — with the collegiate system you hung out with mathematicians, you hung out with physicists, you know, you hung out with a whole mix of people.

* There are a few night spots in Addis Ababa . One of the most popular spots is Club Illusion, with inexpensive drinks, great music, and a hopping dance floor. Source: Trip Advisor

They have a one-to-one tutorial system at Cambridge?

It’s often one-to-two, sometimes one to one, sometimes one-to-two, I think often in my case one to one. That’s quite a good system in a way. The only thing I would say is that academically you are left excessively to your own devices and I was anything but industrious then. I don’t regret that, I mean …

In one of your posts there’s something about the benefits of being clever and lazy rather than being stupid and productive.

That comes from a thing Neil French * said about the German officers didn’t it?

* Neil French is a British advertising executive widely credited with bringing the creative revolution to Asia when he was associated with The Ball Partnership in Singapore. His work for Chivas Regal, Kaminomoto, and in particular the “XO Beer” campaign for The Straits Times, is used as case studies in advertising schools around the world. Source: Wikipedia

I think so.

They ranked officers in four ways; clever and energetic, stupid and energetic, stupid and lazy and … clever and lazy?

Clever and lazy, yeah.

The most dangerous people were the stupid and energetic people because they’ll always do things and because they’re stupid they’ll do stupid things. They actually ranked the clever and lazy people quite highly because they tended to think before doing something, you know, “is there an easier way of doing this”. What is an interesting debate is whether very energetic people sometimes become less creative. I mean it’s interesting that both Paul * and I, in the creative department, will typically get in a bit late.

* “What’s most relevant to me? Talent, Talent, Talent. It’s the bedrock of this agency. It doesn’t matter that talented people are difficult, petulant, opinionated. Without their incandescence we might as well shut the doors and all go home.” Source: Paul Smith, ogilvy.com

They do, they do.

They say that necessity is the mother of invention. It’s also true to say that, you know, a degree of idleness is the mother of invention. I always notice this with account people or secretaries or anybody else, I wont trust them to make my travel plans for me. They’ll always do a something like book me on an 8 o’clock flight from Heathrow, you know, and the whole thing is driven by a sense of urgency and a desire for action. My heuristic in travel is: “how can we make this as easy and painless as possible?” I live in Kent, so if there’s a 10 o’clock flight from Gatwick, that means I can get up at 8 o’clock in the morning or 7 o’clock in the morning, rather than getting up at 5 o’clock in the morning. I won’t feel like shit, I’ll only have to drive 30 miles, and the parking costs 20 quid. I always notice it with, you know, a certain kind of energetic accounts person who always puts you on the early train.

I always remember this thing … realising that although I could fly to Paris and then take a taxi out to the outskirts to a meeting, the Disneyland express actually took me to within two or three miles of the meeting venue, on the outskirts of Paris. Marne La Vallée * is the destination station for Disneyland Paris where the Eurostar goes. I didn’t realise this was the same as Disneyland. I boarded the train at Ashford and suddenly felt like a paedophile, I was a strange man in a tie getting onto a trainload of kids going to Disneyland. Actually, you know, the meeting was about a mile an a half away from Marne La Vallée. The account people had never found that out, you know, they were too busy going: “well you can get a 5am train or plane from so and so…” but there’s a Eurostar that goes all the way, so why would I go through all this shit? People have different heuristics, in behavioural economics language. Some people will want to get there as fast as possible, some people will want it as comfortable as possible. Because people have these different heuristics, I always think allowing someone else to book your travel is a terrible mistake because they may have totally different heuristics to you.

* Disneyland Paris, Val d’Europe, Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, and École des Ponts ParisTech are located in Marne-la-Vallée. Source: Wikipedia

I like small airports, you know, for example London City is fantastic — it’s an absolute doddle. It suddenly occurred to me that at the moment the way British Airways charges for flights is that the empty ones are cheaper and the crowded ones are more expensive. That assumes your heuristic is that you’re really obsessed by what time you travel and need incentives to deviate from that time. When I go to New York I think: “what’s convenient?” I don’t really care, I’m going to take the day off anyway and I’m going to fly out on some flight that isn’t very early in the morning, maybe 11 o’clock in the morning, maybe 8 o’clock at night. Now if BA actually charged me 50 quid extra but automatically put me on the emptiest plane, and maybe texted me the evening before to let me know, I’d happily pay extra. My heuristic is that I’d rather go on an empty plane because you board faster, there’s no scrabbling over luggage, you can get up and wander about, customs is quicker, your luggage gets out faster, all that kind of crap.

Back to talking about the accounts people booking your travel, you used to work on the accounts side, am I right?

I was a terrible accounts person … I’m doing myself a slight disservice, I was quite good at certain aspects of account handling. On the relationship side I was okay, and on the strategic side, but the administrative side was a complete fucking nightmare, I’m absolutely terrible at that stuff.

You were booking people on empty flights?

Yeah, I had a totally different heuristic to everybody else. I was once booked on a time management course and got the date wrong.

ha ha ha.

I was seen as a failure, that was probably the time that I realised I wasn’t really cut out for it. They’d say: “Rory, where are you, aren’t you supposed to be at your time management course?” Oh dear.

How do you think your 25-year-old self, having just been fired, would have responded if you had been told that in 20 years time would be vice chairman of Ogilvy UK?

Incredulity, certainly. Incredulity now, never mind 25 years ago to be honest. What happens is you’re promoted and people start treating you slightly differently, but inside you’re still the same arsehole you always were. It is odd, I mean, Ogilvy fortunately isn’t a very deferential culture is it, really?

No.

Particularly Ogilvy in the UK. The UK isn’t very deferential. In the United States there’s a level of veneration of senior people which I find slightly unnerving to be honest, you know they really do venerate people that are successful in business, all that sort of Forbes magazine porn and stuff like that. You know, wonderful CEO centrefolds with the guy standing in front of a helicopter. The UK isn’t really like that.

The advice I would give to anybody is to be good at two things, not one, know about two things rather than one, and if possible make the two things overlap a bit.

The behavioural economics things have been an absolute Godsend. I had two really lucky breaks, one of them was that my brother was an academic so I heard about the world wide web about a year before it became mainstream. It seems hard to believe now but there was genuinely — both in advertising and in direct marketing — a period of about one or two years where if you went to conferences … I remember the people at conferences, half of them are multi-millionaires now because they were early day internet entrepreneurs in the UK, people like Ajaz Ahmed *, the founder of the digital agency, the name of which I’ve briefly forgotten because I’m bonkers [AKQA]. There were groups of us in basement hotel rooms thinking that this was going to be really big, and we went back to the agency and there might have been ten people who shared our belief . The majority of people thought that this was just a flash in the pan, it’s CB radio, it’s hobbyist, it’s crap. This is at Ogilvy, which had two great advantages at the time in the Microsoft account and the Compaq account, which was soon to be replaced by the IBM account. As an agency we always had a very good IT department and we were always slightly ahead of the curve with IT investment and development because our clients simply demanded that. That was quite good in the end, it meant we got all sorted out on the internet pretty fast.

* Ajaz Ahmed’s AKQA is the world’s largest independent digital agency … Memorable AKQA campaigns include a Wayne Rooney viral video for Coca-Cola, watched by 9 million people, and the Nike Route Finder for Nike’s Run London event. It also designed the user interface for the X-Box 360. Source: The Guardian, Media 100 2007

Also we had this David Ogilvy culture. David Ogilvy had always been a huge sort of high priest for things like direct mail, direct marketing, promotion — he liked alternative forms of advertising. So when the internet came along, if you were wearing the “What Would David Do?” jewellery, you had to take this seriously, because you knew that it wasn’t culturally consistent with Ogilvy just to ignore it. You had to keep on challenging yourself and fighting your assumptions — that really, really helped.

So you found that those two breaks made you the person that you are today?

Well, that and behavioural economics, which was the other lucky break.

Go on …

It just happened. I got interested in economics just because I was ill for a few days and ended up reading a few books — one very good one by Steven Landsburg * called Armchair Economist. It’s a really, really good read. That got me interested in some blogs where I happened to notice that there was a thing called behavioural economics, which fascinated me. I then read a blog post about a book called Nudge * that was coming out in about a week’s time. I went to Amazon and discovered it didn’t come out in the UK for another 9 months or something, so I ordered a copy from the US. I effectively had the first copy of Nudge in the UK. That got me doubly fascinated, so I looked into these Chicago University academics who effectively believed what a lot of us in marketing and advertising had instinctively felt, which is that there’s a lot going on which is influencing human behaviour and decision making that the conventional marketing model doesn’t cover.

* Steven E Landsburg’s most interesting declaration in this book is that “economics in the narrowest sense is a science free from values”; but I’m not sure that it’s exactly true. Free from certain kinds of values perhaps. Landsburg’s opposition to environmentalism, for instance, just involves different values: environmentalists want to ban pesticides, he says, but the economics of such a ban would mean that “fruits and vegetables become more expensive, people eat fewer of them, and cancer rates consequently rise”. Source: Lesley McDowell , The Independent 2009

2. One of the many competitive advantages American public intellectuals have over their British counterparts is the ability to capture their thesis in a single word: Chaos, Sway, Faster, Blink. The most successful of these endeavours colonise the word for the author’s purposes. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, both professors at the University of Chicago, have done it again with Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.Source: Richard Reeves, The Observer 2008

Current conventional marketing models say that you have a brand preference, you follow that brand preference, then you buy the product. What’s obviously true is that there’s a whole load of other influences going on, you know, herd mentality, heuristics, framing, all of which this conventional model doesn’t actually cover. The model relies on people’s reported reasons for their behaviour, and people’s reported reasons for their behaviour are much more rational than their actual reasons.

I think this is something we’ll try to cover in the next interview, I can see you’re quite tired.

No, no, sorry, I’m losing it a bit.

Of course not, we’ve actually got to shoot off now.

Have you got any good photos Rory?

There’s that absurd one over there where I’m in 18th century costume, have you seen that?

Oh yes, that’s brilliant.

That’s ok, sorry about the brief lapse into narcolepsy …

Interview

Part Two

Don’t open that up Millie, oh Christ!

Sophie Sutherland: Millie, Millie come on, go and play in the garden.

In fact we can go in the garden ourselves later, can’t we?

Are you recording?

Yes, yes.

Okay, so do you want me to shut the door?

It doesn’t matter too much. How are you, anyway, Rory?

Not bad. How are things going?

Yeah, good, everything’s going alright. The book’s sort of coming together gradually.

Oh fantastic. What more do you need, I mean you obviously sort of need a bit of family background …

Yeah, yeah exactly. It’d be great to talk through your behavioural economics ideas, then go on to your work as a copywriter, and perhaps touch on what you think the future holds for you and your area of business.

Um yeah, oh crikey, how would you like me to start off, just in behavioural economics?

No it’s alright I’ve got …

You’ve got questions, okay.

A good place to start is probably if you could just give us a very brief outline of what behavioural economics is to you and you know use that in your day-to-day.

It goes back quite a long way. Adam Smith, as well as writing the Wealth of Nations, also wrote a book called … um, I’m struggling to remember what on earth it was. He wrote a book which was called On Human Sentiment *, I think, was it? This tried to understand economic behaviour in terms of human motivation and the human psychological reasons behind economic behaviour, not just the neo-classical utility-maximising questions. It goes back quite a long way, trying to understand what on earth psychological motivation is in large areas of consumption. I suppose this has been understood for two or three hundred years, or at least has been enquired about, but what probably gave it a little bit of a jolt when in 2002 Daniel Kahneman got the Nobel Prize for Economics when he wasn’t even an economist …

* “There are two different occasions upon which we examine our own conduct, and endeavour to view it in the light in which the impartial spectator would view it: first, when we are about to act; and secondly, after we have acted. Our views are apt to be very partial in both cases; but they are apt to be most partial when it is of most importance that they should be otherwise.” Source: Extract from The Theory of Moral Sentiments

He was a psychologist … ?

He was a psychologist. That’s when people realised that this is something that has to be taken seriously. Going back really to the 1950s there were people like Herbert Simon * at Carnegie Mellon, I think, who was perhaps one of the founding fathers.

* Simon was among the founding fathers of several of today’s important scientific domains, including artificial intelligence, information processing, decision-making, problem-solving, attention economics, organization theory, complex systems, and computer simulation of scientific discovery. He coined the terms bounded rationality and satisficing, and was the first to analyze the architecture of complexity and to propose a preferential attachment mechanism to explain power law distributions. Source: Wikipedia

And he was a…?

He was actually also a psychologist, but again interested in decision making and behaviour. He was the guy who coined two words which I think are really, really useful: satisficing and maximising. This says there are two modes of human behaviour. There’s the mode of human behaviour which …to make a gross generalisation—if you’re preparing a wedding or a wedding anniversary and you’re choosing a restaurant, you’re probably much closer to maximising: what’s the best, most memorable, remarkable place you can take people to? Alternatively, when you’re just on the road and you’re stuck in Sheffield City Centre and you’re bloody hungry, you get a McDonald’s, and that’s satisficing.

Right.

It’s probably not the best experience you could possibly have but actually it’s far from being the worst experience you’ve had. The worst experience you could have is being mugged or getting food poisoning, and so on that scale of absolutely brilliant to shite, McDonald’s is still at a 7 or an 8. The reason it does well is because when you’re satisficing, your question isn’t really what’s the best meal you can possibly have, it’s also actually, “how can I avoid having a crap meal.”

Is it kind of “that’ll do”?

Well “satisfice” comes from two words — funnily enough it is actually a Northumberland word which means satisfy, but is also made from two words, suffice and satisfy. When we satisfice we look for something that’s good enough.

I don’t think you can really understand brands without understanding satisficing. People think this is ridiculous. When you’re buying a television, why would you choose a brand? Surely when you buy a television you set out to buy the best television you possibly can, and who makes it or what the label is, is completely irrelevant, right? Now what Herbert Simon would say is that first of all it’s not clear what the best television is, to be absolutely honest. Best in terms of what? Picture quality, likelihood of value for money, likelihood that it will survive for five years? Bear in mind that when you buy a television you’re taking a gamble, because you’re paying all the money up front but you only really know whether you’ve bought a good television four years later, when the thing’s still working, you know, it hasn’t gone all blue for some reason. Have you ever had a television that goes blue? It really is the most depressing thing in the world. Either the vertical hold used to go, or it goes completely blue, or it just goes “bang”. That, or you have some really irritating thing that you never anticipated when you bought it, like if the batteries go on the remote control, or you lose the remote control you can’t turn it on or off. I’ve had electrical devices like that, you lose the remote control and you’re left with this £300 blob of total uselessness.

Ha ha!

There’s an awful lot of uncertainty when you buy things like that. So one question is yeah, what’s the best thing you can buy, but actually there’s no answer to that question — best in what dimension? Most products we’ll buy, we judge on about five or six different measures, it’s not just picture quality — you could probably get a television with perfect picture quality that only lasts a week and no one will want to buy it. This is true unless of course you’re one of those nerds who reads What Television for five weeks before he makes a purchase. In the hi-fi market there’s still people who get their speaker cables hand woven by elves and pay £100 a foot, and in every market there are those people. Now in some markets there are quite a lot of them —I’d argue that in motorbikes there are quite a lot of these people who buy motorbikes and are really serious bikers.

It’s more of a hobby for them?

It is actually, although they claim it’s a form of transport. It’s not really though, it’s a thrill isn’t it. So quite a lot of bikers are actually maximisers, they’ll actually research stuff, and if you’re planning a wedding anniversary dinner you’re not going to go to McDonald’s, you’re going to be a bit of a maximiser. But most of the time, when we’re buying that television, most of us — unless you’re a real TV home cinema weirdo — most of us will go, “well actually I want one that’s in the best 10-15% and it isn’t shit.” Now if we look at brands, that’s where they’re usually found, they’re somewhere in the best 20—25% of the market, and the likelihood of a branded thing — a Pioneer or Toshiba, an LG or a Phillips or a Sony — the likelihood of it being shit is much less than the likelihood that a “Zonga” TV is shit. I don’t want to insult anybody’s television but you now those kinds where you go, “I’ve never really heard of them but it’s cheap.”

Do you see your role in marketing and advertising as helping people to make decisions, or to help brands reach across?

I think the first role of marketing is to make a decision easy to make. And that mean firstly clarity in terms of choice, and secondly it means lack of anxiety. So the first role of marketing is not actually getting preference, it’s not actually getting someone to prefer a Philips TV, it’s getting someone non-anxious about buying a Philips. A very interesting example of the distinction between maximising and satisfying and anxiety is that I prefer Dr Pepper to Coke.

Millie: I love Coke. Coke’s way better.

Yes I agree!

But weirdly, I’ve never asked for Dr Pepper in a bar because you know they’re not going to have it and there’s that mild embarrassment about asking for something they haven’t got, and feeling like a bit of a twat. However, if you ask for Coke and they don’t have it, it’s their fault not yours, the whole dynamic’s completely different. The only place that it’s socially acceptable not to sell Coke is a total health farm weirdo place full of organic produce, and even then it’s a bit irritating. They’ll have loads of those Fentimans Victorian-style lemonades, and even then it’s a bit irritating — come on, just sell Coke for crying out loud! Everywhere else has to sell Coke and it’s their fault if they haven’t got it. An aversion to little things like minor forms of embarrassment stop me from being a maximiser and asking for Dr Pepper, and I’ll always ask for Diet coke if I’m in a pub or a bar unless they have some massive sign saying ‘We Sell Dr Pepper’, in which case I would obviously ask for Dr Pepper.

We seem to be very, very nervy as people, so one of the first roles of marketing is to foster reassurance that what we’re doing isn’t weird and doesn’t stand out. There’s an awful lot of interesting things arise from that, for example Paul Feldwick * says that there are two separate parts of marketing which are saleability and sales and before you can actually sell something you have to give it basic saleability. A perfect example of that is Skoda, which has done a huge heap of advertising — whether they are now successfully selling Skodas is debatable, but over the past eight years what they’ve undoubtedly done is they’ve returned Skoda to basic saleability.

* Paul Feldwick, winner of 2007’s MRS Best Paper with co-author Professor Robert Heath, is widely recognized as an authority on how advertising works. Source: thinkbox.tv

I thought Skoda was that guy in Star Wars?

No, that’s Yoda.

I’m not much of a Star Wars fan, more Harry Potter

Yoda’s the guy who backward speaks — you know, all his words are in a funny …

I think he’s the guy who trained Luke Skywalker.

Yes, that would be Yoda wouldn’t it, who trained Luke.

Understanding that the business of removing negatives is the first job is really important, because there are certain little weird anxious things that put us off buying things, for example being frightened of looking foolish. Nick Southgate * uses the example of sleeper trains and, to some extent, over night flights. We really, really hate getting changed in public, you can go into the loo but that’s disgusting, so why on earth has no airline just said: “let’s lose one lavatory cubicle in Business and First Class and turn it into a changing room?” You know with coat hooks and a bit of …

* Despite devising campaigns to make people pay their tax and listen to Radio 2 more he [Nick] couldn’t shake the philosophy bug and wrote papers on Aristotle & The Notion of Cool and a version of Descartes’ Meditations for market researchers. Source: theschooloflife.com

Yeah.

But often we don’t actually voice these things, we just feel them. We really, really hate that business of getting changed in slightly awkward circumstances or surroundings.

Now, the Skoda thing, this is really interesting. The problem with buying a Skoda was that even when they were quite good you always had to explain to everybody why you’d bought one. I know that sounds really trivial but I’m fascinated by this. Let’s take another example, it’s quite easy to make a tablet that’s better than the iPad. I would argue that the Samsung Galaxy 10.1 Android pad is probably better in technical terms than the iPad. You can put people in a research group and say, “look I’ve just shown you all the features of the Samsung Galaxy 10.1, so what are you going to go and buy now? Will you go and buy the Samsung or will you go and buy the iPad?” And most of them will say that they’ve been convinced, that they’ve seen the technical superiority of this thing, and will go and buy the Samsung, then three days later they’ll go and buy the iPad and you’re left asking why on earth they’re doing that.

One of the answers appears to be in market research — I didn’t realise this but when I mentioned it a few people, like Mark Earls * and people brighter than me who know more about this shit and are proper planners, have said: “actually, that’s a bit of a killer blow for market research” — when you are put in a group of people and you’re researched, you behave like a maximiser because we want to be seen as one. Everybody says they obviously want to find the best television they can within their price bracket. They’d answer all these questions as if they were hyper-logical, they’d say that obviously if this thing costs less than the iPad, and it’s better, then they’ll buy it. Then reality comes into it, and actually, the reason they buy the iPad is that they know that every time they get out the Samsung, all their friends will say: “why did you get that, why didn’t you buy the iPad?” and that this will bring with it a little burst of anxiety and a little burst of effort. Never, never underestimate the importance of that. If you buy a Ford or you buy a BMW or a Volkswagen and it breaks down a lot, it’s Ford’s fault, and you and all your friends will go: “golly you’re really unlucky you bought that new Ford and the clutch plate’s gone, bloody hell, I do feel sorry for you”, and you will get a degree of sympathy from your friends, okay? If you go and buy an Alfa Romeo and the clutch plate goes, deep down all your friends are thinking: “what does he expect, he goes and buys an Alfa Romeo, what the hell does he expect?” If you’re going to buy this flash, weird Italian car, it’s going to break down. That is actually a major force — avoiding social embarrassment and general ridicule and the feeling of people being slightly sarky about what we’ve done. You’ve got to be pretty socially brave not to be affected by that stuff, I’d say probably 5—10% of people are immune. There’s a very, very interesting thing that the old Professor of marketing at London Business School said … Christ I’m 45 and all these names are going … he thinks that one of the groups of people that marketers should recruit are people with Asperger’s *, you know mild Asperger’s or mild autism, because they don’t have some of these social anxieties.

* Asperger syndrome is similar to autism, but is usually less severe. Children with Asperger syndrome generally communicate better than those with autism and have average or above average intelligence. They don’t usually have the learning difficulties seen in children with autism. Source: bupa.co.uk

* As Mark says in his book, we are “a super-social ape”. He believes we exist to converse, to chat, to gossip. In fact whole social movements can be explained by utilising this core theory. An influential thinker for this modern complex yet simple world we live in. Source: dolectures.com

The reason people with anoraks are called anoraks is that they wear anoraks because quite logically, if you’re not bothered about the social associations, an anorak is a really sensible thing to wear. Now, as a crazy director of an ad agency, if you came into work in an anorak — unless it was absolutely the right kind of anorak — you’d practically lose your job. The fact is that it’s a really practical thing if you’re watching trains on a railway station platform, it’s a really sensible thing to wear, you see.

People with mild autism are blind to the associations of what they do because there’s something about the condition which means that they don’t understand them. There’s another argument that the people with Asperger’s are really good social scientists because they actually have to work it all out for themselves. They’ll say “I don’t understand, why are people paying all this money for Armani clothes — they don’t seem any better than what I can get at BHS,” and they genuinely don’t really understand all that social mediation of one-upmanship. As a result, there’s an argument, which this fantastic guy … who’s name I have now completely forgotten and I’ll remember shortly * … his point is that we ought to research those people because there is something that is instinctive in 98% of humans which isn’t shared here.

* Tim Ambler MA (Oxford) SM (MIT), Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Marketing.` Source: London.edu

I think that difference between maximising and satisficing is one of the most important things. You only understand McDonald’s if you understand that. There’s always a better restaurant in town than McDonald’s — although “better” of course is debatable, I mean, what is a good restaurant? Actually, after you’ve been in France for five days, a good restaurant is one that’s fast, because you’ve had five days of sitting around for 1hr 30min being brought multiple courses of stuff and after five days of that you’re heartedly sick of it, and you actually go “Ooh look there’s a McDrive over there, I’ll go in there and it’s cheap and the kids like it.”

How do you use all of this insight in your day-to-day?

The first rule is very simple. You go to people and say — and this, to be honest is the most basic crazy principle of the lot — “don’t look at it like this necessarily—try looking at it like that”.

Treating the perception … ?

Treating the perception, or the frame of reference. Frames of reference are interesting because it does our head in to look at 10 metrics at once, we don’t like making really complicated decisions. Anybody who’s moved house in London, or knows someone who has moved house will know this. Everybody makes a completely arbitrary decision first of all, which might be something like: “I’m only looking in this postal district”, okay? They’ll narrow their search down to like SW11 or wherever, and they’re immediately rejecting four million houses on the basis of no logical reason whatsoever. To be absolutely honest, it’s completely whacko, alright? The next thing they’ll do is say: “okay I want a two bedroom garden flat”, meaning they’ll decide the type of property they want, then they’ll choose among a load of similar flats. The problem of decision making is that mentally we can’t cope with multiple comparison variables simultaneously.

Dad?

Yeah?

We need some money.

Okay, tell Mummy that the money’s in my blazer, my wallet’s in my blazer pocket, okay?

Okay

Trying to compare a garden flat in a posh road in Battersea with a three bedroom flat in a slightly nicer road but in a slightly grottier part of town starts to do our head in a bit, so in order to reduce the choice to a manageable level we make arbitrary decisions, for example: “I’m just looking within 500 yards of the Balls Pond Road.”

Yeah.

It is a pretty weird way, but what else can you do? One thing you can do in marketing if you’re really, really clever, and maybe you don’t get the chance to do it more than once in your lifetime, is that you can just change the order in which people make a decision. There was an interesting estate agent called Stern Studios, do you remember that? Their whole gig was that they covered the whole of London but only sold studio and one bedroom flats.

Oh yes, I remember that.

Now that was interesting. What fascinated me about that was that it’s actually changing the order in which people decide. First they decide they’re going to buy a studio flat, and then what they’ll actually do is look at probably five or six postal districts. So that changed the fundamental order of decision making.

An interesting one is digital cameras. You see, for a long time the mental measure was megapixels, okay? Now for quite a few years that wasn’t a bad measure, it was quite a sensible way to decide because a camera with eight megapixels was almost certainly newer and better than one with four, but now it’s reached a point, I think you’ll agree with me, where once you’ve got about 12 …

You don’t need any more than that.

You’d say 12 is a sensible sort of maximum? Unless of course you’re doing Kim Jong Il’s official portraits that you’re projecting on the side of a building or something …

One day I hope.

You’d get killed for a bit of red eye or something wouldn’t you? Anyway, unless you’re doing massive official portraits … I mean even if you’re working for Athena Posters, 12 is enough. The irony is that most of the time we look at them on a bloody computer screen in which case probably about two is enough, right?

Yeah.

Nokia is the world’s biggest camera maker, interestingly.

The other thing is that we have these things which become a rule of thumb and then we pursue them to a point where they become stupid, mobile phone coverage for example. I actually argue that mobile phone coverage is still shit, but it was measured by a stupid metric which was population coverage or something, so 98% meant the homes of 98% of the population. It’s a total lie by the way. To me, mobile coverage should indicate whether I can make a phone call between Sevenoaks and London Bridge without getting cut off, and almost certainly the answer is no chance, not even a hope in hell. They measured coverage in a stupid way.

One of the dangers is that if you’re BT and selling Broadband, you don’t want the metric to be price, and that happens in some categories. If it’s just a question of a commodity then I just want to buy it as cheaply as I possibly can. So you want the metric to be Wi-Fi qualities, reliability, service reliability and everything else. So changing either the order or the priority or the weight that people give to different variables in a decision is really interesting.

You know my rant about Eurostar?

Ha ha, yeah.

My argument about train travel is that speed is not a very important variable. Once you can get to Manchester in two hours … I think it’s two, is it two and a half hours or two?

I think about two…

The ironic thing is I can’t even remember how long it is. I’ve been to Manchester twice in the last few months by train and time is clearly so unimportant to me I can’t even remember how long it took.

It’s in the news a lot lately.

What, that 24 billion … ?

Yeah, lots of comment suggesting people don’t care so much about speed, they just want comfort.

Well overcrowding is far more important, yield management is a much bigger idea, that idea that you discount quieter trains so that you get a better balance of people travelling at certain times, instead of what used to be the case when I was a kid — on Fridays you stood all the way to Newport from Paddington. Making First Class affordable is a really good thing as well. Weirdly, when I went up to Sheffield, first class was cheaper than second. Presumably because Northerners don’t even look at first class: “not doing that fancy southern first class nonsense”, so they didn’t even look at the comparative price. I went in and first class was 30 quid and second class 40, or whatever.

Government gets fixated on a particular measure like waiting lists and they pursue these things long after they’ve become a sensible measure.

Is it because they’re tangible for the consumer?

Well the people who provide the services may not be very good judges of what the consumer actually values about that service.

Right.

Take McDonald’s for example, the standard American diner offers unbelievable choice: eggs over easy, sunny side up etc. I’m just writing a piece about this, go to Wikipedia and look at all that diner lingo *, you know, “peel one off the wall” which meant “with lettuce”, I’ve no idea why. Every single menu item has these slang phrases like “shit on a shingle” was mince beef and gravy on toast.

* Diner lingo is a kind of American verbal slang used by cooks and chefs in diners and diner-style restaurants, and by the waitresses to communicate their orders to the cooks. It is virtually unknown outside the US. The origin of the lingo is unknown, but there is evidence suggesting it may have been used by waiters as early as the 1870s and 1880s. Many of the terms used are lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek and some are a bit racy or ribald, but are helpful mnemonic devices for short-order cooks and staff. Source: Wikipedia

Eewwwrrr.

Disgusting, I know, I know. But obviously what the American diner assumed is that you have to give anybody pretty much what they want in terms of pigs in a blanket and all that kind of stuff. McDonald’s came along and said: “we make most of our money from hamburgers, so we’ll cut out 95% of the menu and we’ll only serve five things, but we’ll make them in advance of orders so the service will be really, really fast.” At that point nobody in the diner world had thought that speed was all that big a deal. All we can say from the success of McDonald’s is that speed, plus consistency and clean toilets just seem to be really important. McDonald’s must be doing something right because everybody chooses to go there.

Do the disciplines of service design and marketing and advertising cross over quite substantially?

Yeah, well this is one of my things. This is one of the things where advertising — particularly brand advertising and what you might call the conventional ad agency — has to catch up. 15 or 20 years ago, two-thirds of telly advertising was packaged goods, it was the stuff you bought in Tesco or stuff you bought in a pub: beer, margarine, washing powder, cigarettes, washing up liquid, all that kind of stuff, okay? That was two-thirds of all the stuff on telly. Now that’s down to a third. What we actually have now is compare the Meerkat, broadband providers, mobile phone networks, financial services providers, non-packaged goods advertising. This basically means services of one kind or another now dominate, whereas product brands dominated 20 years ago. And they are different.

We now consider the design of the service experience and the design of the choice architecture and just designing how people interact — letting people interact. The fact is that you didn’t have to worry much about the interaction if you were selling Persil in 1988, or indeed now to some extent, because one, you’ve got to buy washing powder otherwise you smell, okay? And two, unless you’re some sort of weirdo, you will be going to a shop which sells washing powder within the next three weeks, and you will walk past the washing powder aisle, and if you have run out of washing powder you will then decide to buy some. The job of the ad was simply to get you to move your hand a foot to the right or a foot to the left or just get it to stay where it is and buy another thing of Persil, or Persil for the first time, or whatever it may be. The behavioural component wasn’t that big.

Now, for example, if you’re the Spectator, you want people to subscribe. So we did train advertising and we put a text response mechanism saying: “text this number with the…” it was actually with the creative execution wasn’t it? So if we had a particular cartoon you’d text the word Twitter to 88888 or whatever it was and we’ll arrange to get you this free copy of the Spectator.

Oh, great.

And what’s interesting is that it works really well, lots of people request free copies of the Spectator. A large number of those people then get converted into a ten week’s subscription for a tenner, and then a rolling quarterly subscription for £23 a quarter or something. The other extraordinary thing is that the average Spectator subscriber is in their 60s, and the average respondent to that advertising is 35.

Here’s a really interesting thing, a lot of people at Ogilvy, senior people at Ogilvy — and I was always really uncomfortable when they said it — used to say: “look, Amazon’s a really successful online book seller, but once Barnes & Noble get serious about selling books online, people are going to choose Barnes & Noble.” Quite a few intelligent people said this, and I always remember thinking that they were wrong. What those people weren’t realising was path dependency, which is about how I want a book or I hear about a book or someone mentions a book or I read about a book or I think about a book or my course professor tells me I need a book. The next decision is which channel I should buy it in — shall I go to a shop or shall I go online? And then the third decision is, in that channel, which branch shall I go to? Now, within the bookshop channel, Barnes & Noble were strong, but once you’ve made the decision that you’re buying that book online the strongest brand in the online channel was Amazon.

In path dependency terms your channel choice may precede your brand choice. I’ll give you an example of this. You probably prefer Pizza Express to Domino’s, okay? But then sometimes you’re sitting at home and you decide “I’m not going to go out for a pizza, I’m not going to collect a pizza, I want one delivered,” and then when you make the delivery decision, your whole brand repertoire changes, and actually Pizza Express don’t deliver. Don’t you think someone should start a business where they collect from Pizza Express and take it to your house?

Like Ocado?

Yeah, like Ocado. Anyway, what will happen is your frame of reference will go to Domino’s. If I was going out for a pizza or going to collect a pizza, Domino’s may not even feature, but once you switch mode then actually your whole repertoire completely changes.

I’ve found that whole thing of choice architecture fascinating because advertising people gave it far too little thought, they just thought that you have brand preference and that translates into purchase. I like Barnes & Noble, I’ll buy books from Barnes & Noble, but it doesn’t work like that. It’s exactly like that order of choosing a flat in London.

You know, a beautiful case where our whole priority system has changed is music. Before, it was all sound quality. I mean some people are still maximisers and they go and buy a Nakamichi * CD player and all that high-end stuff, but before the iPod came along most people said that the most important thing with any sound system was of course sound quality. Then the iPod came along of course, and the unspoken secret which we all know about the iPod is that the sound quality isn’t all that great. It’s okay — it satisfices, that’s the point.

* In the 1950s, Nakamichi developed one of the first open reel tape recorders in Japan under the Magic Tone label. In 1957 it developed and made its own magnetic tape heads Source: Wikipedia

So everybody has the unspoken thought that the sound quality isn’t brilliant but that they can carry an entire music collection in their pocket. Suddenly actually convenience becomes the new mode, or indeed cool. How cool is it that suddenly I’m consuming my music in the presence of friends and other people? Suddenly a whole load of measures become really important in the world of music.

There’s an element now in technology in which we’ve become so obsessed with the next new thing, and actually I think the pace of technological innovation is going to slow down. This is not a majority view, but I just think the fundamental innovations we can make just aren’t that huge. They will be, but in totally unexpected areas and in 15 years time. It’s a bit like the car, in 1930 they effectively had understood the basics of what a car is, you know, four wheels, rear wheel drive, possibly front wheel drive came in the 1930s with a Citroën Traction Avant *, didn’t it?

* For non French speakers, Traction Avant means front wheel drive. But the Traction Avant — the world's first front wheel drive car — was far more than a mechanical development, because it represented an iconic design that can still visually upstage most prestige saloons. Source: motorsnortheast.co.uk

I have no idea … !

I think that Citroën was the first major front wheel drive car. That was probably the most radical car of the decade in which it appeared. I would argue that one of the interesting things to make a bet on are those brands which actually produce things that are quite timelessly good. So I like Roberts Digital Radios because of the fact that you buy one of those and in 18 years time it will still be perfectly cool to have that thing, you know, but it’s a Wi-Fi radio. The Dualit toaster would be another example. I don’t have one myself, you know, it’s a wee bit overpriced, but I understand the point of the Dualit toaster. Funnily enough it’s a bit of a British strength. Those things made by Bowers & Wilkins, the Zeppelin iPod dock, you know that thing shaped like a, well, Zeppelin?

It does look quite cool.

And actually, the sound quality is fantastic. So I’d say Bowers & Wilkins, Roberts, there’s a thing by Monitor which is a Wi-Fi radio I’ve got, the Dualit toaster, the Russell Hobbs kettle — there will be a slight trend in electronics towards that timeless thing, just like actually having one of the original old iPods which is actually now a bit cooler than having the latest thing.

There’s a very, very strong heuristic in any market where there’s massive progress. There’s a very, very strong bias that the newest thing is the coolest, and my prediction … if I were a shareholder I’d go and put some money into Roberts and Dualit and people like that.

Is it because people don’t like the inconvenience of updating their products every six months?

Yeah, we get a bit sick of this stuff. I mean it gets a bit boring having to relearn how to use your toaster every three weeks.

There’s a very interesting American thing, a very important environmental question, which is that when you do your washing in a washing machine, you probably use some sort of pod or gel, right? What I’m saying is you don’t use one of those big box powders — the unfortunate phrase — where you get an enormous great box of stuff and take it home. Americans still use those things, and Tide could save a fortune in transportation costs, packaging costs and all manner of environmental costs if they could get Americans to use tablets or pods. It’s not to do with anything fundamental — it’s that most Americans outside New York have either a basement or an outhouse and all their washing equipment is out of sight. Their washing machines are huge industrial things, they’re Maytag or Westinghouse and they look like something from a launderette or a factory, whereas we have ours in our kitchens so they’ve got to look nice. Because their things are industrial, they see this as an industrial laundry process and so they like putting huge quantities of powder into a massive machine.

Geoffrey Miller *, the guy who wrote Spent, said that there’s a European heuristic, which is that intricacy is good and that’s why Europeans make things like watches — you know, one of your status symbols will be a really intricate small watch; and an American hueristic, that kind of Hummer mentality, which is “big is good”. That extends to washing powder which is interesting because P&G would save themselves tens of millions of dollars a year if they could work out a way to persuade the Americans to put small tablets into washing machines rather than vast quantities of powder.

* But Miller does not preach; he also thinks evolutionary psychologists could learn a thing or two from marketers. Through their experience of selling real products, marketers develop an intuitive understanding of consumer behaviour that could help evolutionary psychologists refine their theories of evolved preferences and sexual signalling. If this dialogue develops as Miller hopes it will, a rich seam of new research might be opened up. Source: The Guardian, 2009

When people are designing a product or service, why do you think that it’s so common to overlook human irrationalities?

It’s not necessarily irrational. It can be irrational; this is actually a very big debate in behavioural economics. Some people say it’s a bias, which includes Dan Ariely * who mostly suggests the we’ve evolved these traits to make decisions very quick and easy, because in evolution speed of decision making was more important than perfection in decision making, but what it does bring with it is certain biases. And I think some of these things are biases. I have to fight really hard not to buy a second home because we tend to see things that we own as an investment whereas things that we rent we see as an extravagance. My argument is that if I buy this place, even if it’s crap, it’s not going to go up in value, realistically, for the next few years and the council tax alone is going to be two grand a year. Well, for two grand I can go and stay in a hotel for 20 nights and actually have people bring me tea and shit.

* As a behavioral economist, Dan Ariely studies how people actually act in the marketplace, as opposed to how they should or would perform if they were completely rational. His interests include daily behaviours such as buying (or not), saving (or not), ordering food in restaurants, procrastination, dishonesty, and decision making under different emotional states. Source: crunchbase.com

Ha ha ha!

You know, whereas if I buy a home all that’s going to happen is I’m going to spend my two weeks holiday in France trying to work out what the French is for: “my septic tank has exploded” or working out stupid repairs and bits of crap like that. But instinctively we like owning things and we’ve actually got to teach ourselves not to.

Anyway, there are biases, but people like Gerd Gigerenzer * said that actually a lot of the time these heuristics were used actually lead to really good decisions.

* He [Gigerenzer] argues that heuristics should not lead us to conceive of human thinking as riddled with irrational cognitive biases, but rather to conceive rationality as an adaptive tool that is not identical to the rules of formal logic or the probability. Source: Wikipedia

Right.

He would claim that in many cases when given imperfect information, the heuristics people use are really, really good. Take catching a ball — I’ve probably mentioned that if cricketers tried to use advanced physics to catch a ball they’d still be doing the maths long after the ball had hit the ground 200 feet away. What you do is you use a heuristic: you look up at the ball and you run towards it at whatever speed keeps your angle of gaze constant.

Trial and error …

Well it is constant trial and error, and that’s actually a better system because you’re solving the problem and calculating the solution simultaneously, whereas mathematics requires you to calculate the solution and then enact it. Heuristics allows you to do both in parallel which is much, much better for ball catching than maths is. Now, dogs use exactly the same heuristic to catch frisbees. There’s a whole paper on this about how dogs catch frisbees which a load of academics actually did research into.

There’s an instinctive decision which is that if you have three things, a cheap one, a medium priced one and an expensive one we choose the one in the middle. Now that varies by person. If you’re very, very rich you’ll choose the most expensive one. A relative of mine is quite rich and it’s very interesting that she went in to buy a digital camera, she’s about 75, and what was weird was that the guy in the digital camera shop was actually down selling her. She thought: “well I want to have a really good camera” and he, I think, sensibly thought: “look she’s 75 years old if she buys the most advanced camera you know it will be incomprehensible.” So interestingly the guy was trying to down sell her, which is slightly strange behaviour from a sales person, but I see what he was doing.

Her assumption was: “what’s the point of being quite rich if I’m only buying a cheap camera?” And you get that among the very rich and that’s why you get rich-person brands like Bang & Olufsen and Loewe televisions. They cater for that sort of person who goes: “what’s the point of me being worth six million quid if I have the same telly as the guy down the street”. Equally if you are a professional photographer you won’t buy the same camera everybody else does, you’ll maximise a lot more. Nonetheless, most of the time people are actually saying that the cheap one’s probably crap, the expensive one’s probably a rip off so the go for the one in the middle. It seems to make it easier for us. One interesting rule which I have suggested to BP is that as well as BP Ultimate, they should create BP Super Premium Plus which costs like three quid a litre, and then BP Ultimate becomes the normal petrol people buy because it’s the one in the middle.

I’ve just got one of those Nespresso machines, it’s fantastic. The really interesting thing about this Nespresso machine is that if I asked you to go out and buy those Twinning’s super premium teabags which are £6.50 for 25 teabags you’d look at me as if I’m bonkers. For £6.50 you should get 100 teabags, 1,000 tea bags, you know? But actually it’s 25p for a cup of tea, it’s not bonkers, you pay a quid or two at Starbucks, but paying that for a teabag seems impossible. What’s clever about the espresso machine is that because it comes in individual pods, if you had to buy a jar of espresso coffee it would cost about 150 quid. You say to yourself: “I can’t, I simply cannot buy this thing, I cannot bring myself to pay 100 quid for a jar of Nescafe, it’s impossible”, but because the things come in individual pods, our frame of reference isn’t Nescafe, it’s Starbucks, where we actually pay a quid or two for a shot of coffee at Starbucks, so at 26p, well the machine’s paying for itself, right?

Ha ha ha!

One of the interesting things they’ve done a survey of is that your need for luxury brands is directly proportionate to the geographical and social mobility of the environment in which you operate. The oil industry generated a huge amount of money but nobody knew who anybody was, because everybody had flooded in and there was massive social and geographic mobility. In China the luxury goods thing is very, very strong, firstly because large numbers of people are from out of town, secondly, often in China you don’t take people to your house — your status depends on the clothes you’re wearing, so luxury goods brands have a value in status terms to the Chinese that is far greater than it would be to most French people living in their ancestral home, for example. British Aristocrats don’t wear massive belts with “Moschino” on.

No

If you’ve lived in the same house for 500 years you don’t need to wear blingy clothes. Footballers’ wives do that because they are more socially anxious and also the geographic mobility thing. In your home village everybody knows who the hell you are and where the hell you live, so it’s pretty senseless getting into all those sort of bling competitions. In the big cities where nobody knows who you are, there is a value to status indicators that are portable. There’s interesting research on this showing that actually the need for luxury goods is very much one that comes with social and geographic mobility. It’s not irrational because this is a Darwinian thing. The urge not to be patronised or belittled is a pretty strong innate human urge. Women’s fashion is a slightly nasty area. I’d have more ethical concerns in some ways about working in some areas of women’s fashion than on working on tobacco or booze.

In your role as the President of the IPA, did you feel that it a personal mission to get the industry thinking about behavioural economics?

If you look at David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach and Howard Luck Gossage *, you know, three of the greats, their whole thing was that they were wannabe academics more or less.

* “What is the difference between seeing an ad on a billboard and seeing an ad in a magazine? The answer, in a word, is permission—or, in three words, freedom of choice.” Source: stayfreemagazine.org

Right.

Bernbach wasn’t really interested in other ad agencies, he wanted to know what academics were writing on human behaviour. Ogilvy was a former researcher who wanted to move the agency to Princeton, out of New York.

I didn’t know that.

The guy who discovered Marshall McLuhan was this guy Howard Luck Gossage. What’s totally weird to me is how … and not just to me by the way — if you talk to people like Jonathan Stead * at Rapier, who’s one of the founders of Rapier, he got something like a first at Oxford in Psychology and he joined the advertising industry and assumed that from day one people would be asking him to tell them what the latest in psychological thinking was, because surely they’d need to know this shit. He said he had a first in bloody psychology in Oxford, and in ten years in the advertising agency no one asked him a single question based on his academic understanding of psychology. That’s whack, that’s simply whack. Now part of it is that crazy people have come to see science as the enemy of what they do because they’ve been beaten up by bad science. You know, stupid things like absurd kind of pre-testing mechanisms.

* “People don’t like learning something new, and we’re very conservative. That’s why it takes blood, sweat and tears to achieve proper integration.” Source: campaignlive.co.uk

Market research?

Really bad market research. What you actually find is that if you do good science rather than bad science, if you accept that actually this is seduction not persuasion, that it’s much more oblique than clients and researchers like to think, that reason plays a much smaller part in it than people realise. There’s a danger of bias in the sense that the forces of logic have monopolised all the good words, you know, rational, sensible etc. Actually our instinctive decisions are really, really great.

I was just going to give a talk on the importance of instinctive decision making versus rational decision making. The greatest irony of all was that on my way to giving the talk I was distracted and was within three seconds of being hit by a bus. It was one of those cases when I looked the wrong way crossing the road and I was conscious of the bus approaching me and instinctively jumped backwards, and I subsequently was able to say at the talk that actually were it not for my instinctive decision making I wouldn’t be here giving the talk at all because I’d be in hospital. So instinctive decision making is really good, there’s a huge value to speed. There’s also a huge value to trial and error, as we discussed earlier. So actually understanding the way in which people make decisions seems to me the fundamental discipline at the heart of everything we do. How do people choose? How can we make it easier for them to choose? Because maybe we would be better off if they chose our competitor rather than choosing no one in our category, which is a really interesting debate which no one has ever had and I don’t know the answer to that.

If you’re BT Broadband, patently the best decision people could make for you is to choose BT Broadband, but if two alternative decisions are either getting so confused by the competitors in the category that you don’t get broadband at all, or getting a competitive broadband, which of those two is better? It’s actually a really interesting philosophical question to ask which no one asks.

There may be a role in which if you are a market leader, making the decision really easy to make — even if that means making it easy for 20 people to reject you — is perhaps the best thing you can do.

The most beautiful thing I heard of was that cocktail pod, was I telling you about that? I get annoyed because everybody always buys wine as the default alcoholic drink, even if they’re having a party in the garden where no food’s being served — all that crap, and it really, really pisses me off.

I won’t be inviting you to a party at my place …

Red or white? That’s not a choice. That’s two things I don’t like where I just get to choose the colour. It’s like that still or sparkling thing with water, basically the restaurant says: “you’re going to buy some expensive water you bastard, but

you can choose whether it has bubbles in it or not.” Why do people drink wine so much? One of the reasons is of course is that it’s very easy to buy — you just bought all your groceries, you just pick up a bottle of wine, you go home and you take the top off and you drink it.

Wine does defy logic in one sense — in nearly everything else we buy we value consistency. If one in three bottles of whisky we bought, or one in three pints of beer we bought in the pub were total shit, we would never go to that pub again, and yet one in three glasses of wine we try are just rubbish, and yet we persist in trying to drink wine, and I genuinely don’t quite know why it is. You know, it doesn’t quite make sense, do you see what I mean?

I think so …

I think the rule is that actually the social embarrassment is relatively low.

The anxiety of asking for something else?

I am mystified by it, I have to say.

It’s easier to get a good gin and tonic, I mean there’s some consistency there.

Yeah this is what doesn’t make sense to me, I’d love to know why it defies what is logical. Another interesting thing is of course that by the time you’ve got into the gin or rum section, the things you need to make cocktails with — tonic water, ice, limes and lemons — are all 300 feet away at the other end of the supermarket. In Sainsbury’s and Asda, now they’ve installed a cocktail pod which has limes, lemons, ice and a selection of mixers and a selection of things like the syrup you need if you’re making whisky sours and possibly eggs. In every store where they’ve installed that cocktail pod, spirit sales overall have gone up by 9%.

Wow.

Yeah, wow!

That’s a much bigger effect than you could ever achieve by advertising — that’s a massive, massive affect.

So do you see your role as an advertiser or marketer evolving into this sort of realm, and away from the more traditional forms of advertising?

Well, I think our job is very simple — it’s the job of anyone in marketing is to turn human understanding into business advantage or social advantage, okay? That’s the only job. When the main way you did that for Persil was to run advertising for Persil, all you needed to know about to do that job was basically how to make a good TV advertisement for Persil. But now, actually, the game’s changed.

If the thing that’s affecting the decision making isn’t exclusively the advertising it’s also the fact the … I go bonkers with Dove, one of the Ogilvy brands, because there’s a fairly basic rule in life which says that social proof matters and people will buy whatever is the most prominent on the shelves. If there’s a hell of a lot of Pantene kicking around, that means that a lot of people must buy Pantene, which means that Pantene obviously isn’t shit. Okay? By the way, I’ve got a good joke, have you heard this one? How much does shampoo cost in Romford? “Paan-ten”! Sorry, anyway …

Oh dear. I’m glad we got that.

Oh, ha ha!

I think it’s a brilliant joke personally. Sorry, anyway … you’ve heard the other one, about the girl that gets into the car crash?

Oh, no. Go on …

The paramedics arrive and she says: “oh help there’s blood everywhere!” This crash is outside Braintree, “there’s blood all over my face and I’m bleeding, it’s horrible!” The paramedics say: “okay, first of all calm down, what’s your name?” Her name’s Sharon. “Right Sharon, where are you bleeding from?” She says “Romford”. Anyway, ha ha ha, sorry.

Our job then is to do whatever is required to overcome the psychological obstacles that consumers may have when buying whatever it is our client’s want to sell. Our secondary job is actually understanding people well enough so that our clients can develop products that people want to buy at a price they want to pay, okay? And that’s it. Those are the two ways, you either change the people or circumstances so the existing product sells more, or you change the product so the people want it more. Somewhere along the line you tinker with whatever variables make the business more efficient, more profitable and make the brand stronger as a result. I think those are the vital things, it’s not enough to say: “yeah but I can make really good TV ads”, because that might not solve the problem. That’s rather like being absolutely brilliant on grass but being useless on clay.

You might be addressing the completely wrong problem?

Yes, you may actually address completely the wrong problem. In general, where we’ve been wrong in the past — and it’s worth saying — is that direct marketing people have underestimated dramatically the importance of indiscriminate fame. One of the mistakes direct marketing people bought into was that they thought it was all about targeting and efficiency. Actually if you want saleability as opposed to sales, making the thing famous and creating buzz and voltage and general mental activity around the product, mental availability if you like, so that it’s a product that rapidly springs to mind is of inordinate value. Without wanting to diss conventional advertising, the role of advertising is still very important because people buy things they’ve heard of and the reason people buy things they’ve heard of is that fame is a massive source of reassurance.

How involved are you at Ogilvy in the creative process … or the decision making process when working for brands?

I like to think of myself as being involved within the indecision making process. What I’m saying is my first job, or the first way to add value is to say: “don’t assume it’s like this, it might be like that.” In other words, that business of satisficing or maximising is a really, really important thing. Saying to people: “okay you’ve been taught as advertising people, tell people to buy this thing because it’s brilliant”, might miss the mark. I would ask what the shit thing is that’s stopping them buying it at the moment. Of course, it may not be that no one’s told them that it’s brilliant, it may be that there’s one fundamental flaw in terms of the whole purchase or decision making process that people find really, really off-putting.

If I were competing with McDonald’s, I’d say that actually what McDonald’s does well is the level of cleanliness and the design of the restaurants. They’re really, really clean. Even when you’re in a slightly grubby part of town the McDonald’s is a fantastically well kitted out thing. Secondly, the imagery that McDonald’s has employed and the new colourways they’ve employed have done a lot to take it away from its industrial associations. A lot of advertising people would say: “yeah but that’s not an idea”, but the effect it had by taking away the predominance of yellow and creating a thing that’s yellow on a dark brown background with some green furniture is … there are basic heuristics within the restaurant scene and this suggests that they have been to a farm, that they know what a chicken looks like, etc. Once you understand what the heuristics are in design, that can make me choose a shampoo.

With Dove we’re saying … sorry about the Pantene thing before, I got distracted. We know that if you have a lot of facings on the shelves, people tend to buy more of you, and yet Dove appears as a complex brand — it appears in three different places on the shelf. It appears in the hair care section, then 20 feet away it appears in the skin care section, then it appears next to loads of bars of soap, then it appears dotted somewhere else next to deodorant. If you could buy a bloody gondola end and put the whole range in one place, more people would buy Dove.

Just because of the impact?

Just because of the impact of the scale of the thing.

So you try to communicate this to the brands?

All I’m suggesting is that we stop always talking about the same fucking things. Don’t get me wrong fame’s really important, saliency is really important, some brand metrics are really quite interesting … although frankly, to be absolutely honest, people’s brand opinions are usually a product of whether they buy the brand or not, rather than the reverse …

Dad, can you open this for me please?

I thought you were bringing it for me but evidently not. Did you bring anything back? Did you bring milk back from the shop?

No.

Cigarettes?

No, we got the post …

Oh okay. Wine, whisky, beer?

Dad it’s a coffee shop, they’re not going to sell …

Did you not go to the shop across the road?

You still haven’t opened it.

I have opened it. Look!

Look, can you leave it open because …

There you go, don’t tip it. You can open that one can’t you?

Yeah

Okay. Did you bring me coffee?

No!

Useless children!

Would you mind talking a bit about your time as a copywriter?

Well I still am, I still write the odd bit of copy now and then, I keep my hand in and I enjoy doing it enormously. I was lucky enough to learn from, really, really good people — Steve Harrison and Drayton Bird * being two of them, Randy Handfelder being another very, very good teacher of copywriting, David Nobay as well, who is now the Creative Director of Droga5 in Australia. Drayton Bird is really the greatest guru in direct marketing in Britain. To learn from him was an extraordinary, an extraordinary privilege. Steve Harrison is obviously absolutely brilliant as well and so that was a very lucky break.

* Advertising legend the late David Ogilvy said he [Bird] “knows more about direct marketing than anyone in the world. His book about it is pure gold. His speeches are not only informative, but hilariously funny.” Source: leadersin.com

Doing Classics helps as well, doing Latin just helps you to know whether the sentence you’ve written is grammatically okay or not. We shouldn’t underestimate that. I love writing, partly because it’s one of the few activities which actually gets me to concentrate. I can’t concentrate on anything, I’ve got no capacity for prolonged concentration or undivided attention at all. My children are bonkers about this because when they ask for my undivided attention I say no, but offer them some divided attention and they get really pissed off about it. Writing is about the only thing that forces me to sit down and really, really focus.

Are there any pieces that you’re really proud of?

Yes. Some work I did in the 90s for American Express, this is years ago now, but three mailings of Jane Austen books, Pride and Prejudice then Sense and Sensibility and then Persuasion, which were mailed on Monday, Wednesday and Friday to encourage people to accept sales visits from American Express. Pride and Prejudice just had a list of all the reasons you’re against accepting an American Express Card, Sense and Sensibility had ten reasons to reconsider, and Persuasion outlined why it was worth meeting our sales people for a ten minute visit. We built the whole thing into that and I’m still proud of that. It never won a bloody thing but I still think it was one of the best … it’s often true that the best thing you think you ever did never won much.

I quite liked an ad I did for Nordic Track which was an exercise machine which just had the headline: “Waist Disposal Unit”, I like a good pun. Most copywriters hate them but I love a nice pun. Another American Express piece which was just a series of small businessmen explaining why they’d reversed their antipathy to accepting American Express. I’m still pleased with that. I am also very pleased with an ad done by another agency, BBDO Colenso in New Zealand. If you look up “Impulse Saver” and “Westpac”. All the work was based on an idea I propagated at TED as an idea worth sharing.

How did it feel giving your ideas away for free?

I don’t mind about that. I’m 45 now, I’ve done my bit about winning awards. People know who I am. If they think I’m good they think I’m good, if they think I’m shit they think I’m shit, nothing’s going to change that now. I’m perfectly happy giving ideas away because an idea is worthless unless it’s executed. One thing I would say is I owe our clients the first pick but if none of our clients buy an idea, my view would be give the bloody thing away. Incidentally, one way to get your own bloody clients to do it is to get their competitors to do it; they’re bloody lazy most of these organisations, and they only actually do anything when their competitor does it. If you want to get your client to do something, give the idea to their competitor. I shouldn’t say that, should I?

Off the record.

Not necessarily off the record. It is difficult, large companies are not as innovative as they should be and their R&D departments are not as connected to marketing as they should be.

So how do you really encourage them to take on these ideas?

With mixed success to be honest. You just keep trying and trying and trying and about one time in 15 you succeed. You just have to accept an incredibly low success rate. I agree, it’s depressing. We came up with a card the other day, you have a card with a chip at each end. One way round it’s a credit card, the other way it’s a charge card.

And what was their response?

Neither of us who came up with the idea could understand why they rejected it. I genuinely don’t understand it.

So where do you go from there?

Well, then the idea might be researched and killed by the idiots in research. That’s the second stage at which things get destroyed. The other thing which I’m really proud of which I can’t really report was something that was getting very average response rates. Knowing what I know about behavioural economics, we made one fundamental change to a letter, and the response rate went up by a factor of about five. That’s what I try and do nowadays. In my view there are lots of people trying to do good crazy work and trying to win awards, and to some extent I’m really pleased when I win awards, but I don’t want to duplicate that effort. What I try and do in the ad agency is try and do the things that nobody else is doing, and one of those roles is just finding people out there who do really interesting things, or have really interesting media opportunities for example.

If Bernbach and Ogilvy and Gossage were all to come back, they would all be baffled by the lack of scientific progress in the last 20 years in terms of understanding how communication works, why it works and how to make it better. There’s quite a lot of evidence now that suggests that entertaining and likeable ads work, and yet in many cases you have clients who believe that ads work through persuasion and rational argument, not through seduction. Clients like this are making ads less likeable, less amusing and less effective in the belief that they are actually making them better, and that is a terrible, terrible waste of effort. A really disturbing waste of effort.

Just one last thing that we’d really like to cover is that you’ve achieved so much in your career already …

I’ve just had two lucky, two or three lucky breaks. One of them was spotting the internet early, then I was quite lucky working for an agency which had IBM, well Microsoft, Compaq then IBM and Cisco and BT among our clients, so we obviously found it relatively easy to introduce online and interactive advertising fairly early as all those clients had target audiences who were on line pretty early. So that was a lucky break. When I started at Ogilvy in 1988, I don’t think any of us realised at the time what an extraordinary place it was. It was just one of those places where within five or six years half the significant people in direct marketing passed through, and also it was the spawning ground for some really remarkable ad talent — Andy Firth, Andy Greenaway, David Nobay. Obviously Drayton Bird was there, Steve Harrison was there, Guy Barnett was there, Randy Handfelder was there, Mike Simm, my old partner, very good guy, Colin Nimick who’s still there in Ogilvy. Later on, Emma and Charlie as well which gave a kind of second generation to the thing.

I was lucky. Direct marketing at the time, if we’re being candid, was actually thought of as a second best opportunity to working in advertising, but then when the internet came along we suddenly realised in retrospect that it was the best thing that could have happened. You know, you’d been in exactly the right place at the right time, so a huge amount of this stuff is luck. The one other bit of luck was that I was ill for four days. You should take a bit of time off ill from work even if you’re not ill because you get to do things like reading a book, which you rarely have the time to do in the real world, because there’s always some other crap to distract you. I happened to be ill and I started reading a couple of books on economics, and then I got into behavioural economics, then I got into a few behavioural economics blogs and I happened to discover this book called Nudge, which we have discussed. I just started babbling on about this stuff because I felt it was what I call the missing third.

If you want to understand human behaviour, logic can tell you a certain amount. For example, if you put the price down people would probably buy more of what you are selling. If you’re running a pub and it smells of piss, people probably won’t go there. That’s something you don’t need to research, you know that by and large logic will say that it’s not a good idea, okay?

Then there’s the information market research can tell you, you know, asking people whether they’d prefer your pub to smell of urine or not? Those are questions which people will answer fairly honestly, you know, they’d rather buy this than that because they think it looks nicer. Research is not all total rubbish, I mean, you know, people do have some access to their thoughts and feelings and they can occasionally describe their behaviour with a degree of accuracy.

But then there’s this other thing which is what I call the missing third. It’s probably more like the missing half in terms of human behaviour in truth, it’s the influences on behaviour that logic won’t tell you and research won’t tell you. I’ll give you an example of that. Take Red Bull. My theory asks how can they charge £1.50 for a can of Red Bull, when Coke only costs 50p? In a way they succeeded because they made the can smaller … people recognise that it’s not a Coke can, it’s a small can, therefore this must be a different kind of drink from Coke so maybe there’s a reason why it charges £1.50 rather than 50p. Now the interesting thing is logic’s not going to tell you that. No one’s going to suggest that in order to be able to charge £1.50 for this you have to make the can smaller. No consumer research group is going to say: “I’m not paying £1.50 for that mate, but I would if you gave me less of it.” No one’s ever going to say that. But the truth of the matter is that that’s how the brain works sometimes.

My concern is that if we have incomplete knowledge of human decision making, then our decision making lacks predictive value. That is incredibly dangerous because it means that one, a lot of advertising money is misspent, and two, an awful lot of R&D which relies on logic and research and not on behavioural economics will actually be wrong. The danger of that is that if your R&D only has a 10/20% success rate rather than a 30/40% success rate, you will spend progressively less and less on R&D. The real thing that grows economies, which is innovation, actually starts to diminish. What’s happening at the moment is that all companies are trying to improve their figures by cost cutting, you know, cutting the wage bill, bringing in procurement to drive down supply costs, outsourcing things to India, etc. But what they’re not spending nearly enough money on is innovating. What’s the next Cornetto, for example? Some brands haven’t brought out a meaningful innovation in fucking years have they?

No, they haven’t.

There’s a guy in Africa who’s brought out this idea of a dry bath, which he was selling to African taxi drivers as a to have a wash and brush up without needing a supply of water.

They have dry shampoo.

You can buy dry shampoo can you? Where do you buy that from?

Boots.

Boots? And you just put a powder in and then brush it off?

Spray a powder and brush it out.

That’s brilliant. The reason I want to buy this stuff is that I’m convinced that this business of getting dressed in the morning is a complete pain in the arse, and it hasn’t got any easier since the 1920s — it’s actually got worse because you don’t have servants to do it for you anymore. There’s an interesting question there, which is why is there no innovation in terms of … I mean, nobody’s made baby wipes for adults, have they? Now if you could do that, you would just get a couple of large wipes which actually removed the need to have a full shower in the morning, you know one day out of two.

The ad business is weird. I can go to a client with three things from behavioural economics, actual insight which he may be able to use, but the problem with market research is we as the ad agency just became completely passive recipients of insights. Unless a client came to us and said: “we’ve had this insight”, we couldn’t really start work because we couldn’t generate our own raw materials. It was a bit like being a shoe repair business where you just sit there, and unless anybody like comes along and says: “I’ve got a hole in my shoe”, there’s nothing you can do. Why are the key cutting and shoe repair in the same place?

Machinery, perhaps?

You need a big rotating thing for both maybe do you? Is that the idea? You need a big electric motor?

I feel a bit helpless. You know, we actually wait for our clients to come to us and say: “we’ve got a problem and here’s a budget.” My view is that behavioural economics can enable us to go and say: “you’re doing that all wrong, mate.”

You’ve talked a bit about the lucky breaks you’ve had, and we talked about behavioural economics, but what comes next? What are you setting out to achieve?

Oh, that’s really easy. I’d just like to do anything I can to restore the status of marketing through better human understanding, and better predictive understanding of human behaviour, to a point where most organisations have someone on their board who has an understanding of psychology and marketing as well as an understanding of finance and everything else. At the moment we have a weird board bubble in most British companies, they’re a sort of slightly autistic entity full of people who are really good at finding their way around a balance sheet but don’t know anything about …

So you get really dumb decisions like the 3G auction or the high speed railway, which is, you know, if you’re a bunch of engineers you’ll come up with any excuse to build a fucking railway because it’s your idea of fun, okay? The fact is that consumers and ordinary people don’t really care that much about whether Birmingham takes 1hr 30min or 50 minutes to get to. In fact, by the time you’ve got to Euston, you need 1hr 30min to sit down and have a bloody relax to get over your anxiety at getting through Euston station. Now that is London’s chaviest, nastiest station, isn’t it? It’s a horrible station.

I would use buses but I don’t understand them. I am sure there must be buses that go from Canary Wharf into central London, but I’ve been working in Canary Wharf for 10 years and no one’s told me where to go, what do I do? There are all these people running buses and no one’s thought to say actually, there are 100,000 people in Canary Wharf and look how crowded the Jubilee line is. I personally hate going underground. It’s purely a foible. You can’t piss around on your phone and look at bits of apps and things, it’s just irritating.

Having lived in Bayswater for 11 years you end up totally writing off South London. Quite rightly, because most of south London is total shit, but south east London is fantastic! I discovered this driving home here from central London late at night and the variety of places you go through is amazing. I actually might be the mayor of KFC in Peckham on Foursquare. You go through unbelievably rough areas and then you drive another hundred yards and it’s fantastic. Hearn Hill actually looks really good. It’s got that fish and chip shop, there’s an African restaurant round the corner — it used to be African, maybe Moroccan, what is it?

No, I think unfortunately you’re a bit late now.

The African one closed down, did it?

26.7.2011

Hi Rory,

Hope you’re well.

One of the things we didn’t cover yesterday was suggestions for Behavioural Economics books for a “reading list.”

We found a post from Quora in which you recommend the books covered in this post: http://bit.ly/gb7Dup

Would it be possible to pick out five or ten and possibly give a couple of lines on why you think they’re relevant?

Thanks.

± ± ± ± ± ± ± ± ± ± ±

26.7.2011

Will get back to you in the next few days……. hope that’s okay.

± ± ± ± ± ± ± ± ± ± ±

15.9.2011

Hi Rory,

I was wondering if you could suggest more personal reads that you have enjoyed over the years that are not to do with BE? Things that have inspired you, or that you have just thoroughly enjoyed. A small handful of titles would be great, perhaps with a one-line reason of what you like about it.

Many thanks.

± ± ± ± ± ± ± ± ± ± ±

- Under the Frog and The Thought Gang by Tibor Fischer

- Born Liars by Ian Leslie

- The complete Sherlock Holmes

- P G Wodehouse (all)

- How I escaped my certain fate, by Stewart Lee

- The Great Stagnation, by Tyler Cowen

- Foundation Cities TED Talk by Paul Romer

Stories about Rory

When we first met Rory he managed to set fire to himself by putting a lit pipe in his jacket pocket while reviewing our portfolio.

Emma DeLaFosse and Charlie Wilson

The 3.30pm RyanAir flight at Poitiers. Moments after roast quail, autumn vegetables, creme caramel, exquisite cheese and fabulous red wine at Touffou. On board, first thing Rory orders is a CuppaSoup. He declares it, “Delicious.”

Will Awdry

The first encounter with YUM’s senior executives took us all aback.

He endeared them with a passionate plea to bring back Taco Bell to the UK! He felt it was a serious mistake to withdraw the brand. Not only that he even offered to become a franchisee should they reconsider. Seeing a TB outlet in rural Sussex would indeed have been a sight…

Now that’s showing passion for clients’ brands — in true DO spirit.

Stephen Fraser

Stuck with Rory at Berlin airport as a European volcano spewed ash over our flight path, I was intrigued by how he appeared nonplussed at our seven-hour delay. Then I discovered it was because Berlin’s Tegel houses an all-hour Burger King. Rory promptly took it upon himself to educate me in the finer points of Chilli Cheese Dipper appreciation, no doubt giving me a real leg up in life!

Nazia Du Bois

About 5 years ago, Rory came to New York for a 2 day meeting. On the last day, we were having a drink at the bar, and he said he had to go pick up his dry cleaning before heading for his flight. I was quite surprised at this given he had only been in NY 2 days, to which he replied “I brought all my dry cleaning from home, always do, they are better and cheaper here”.

Marie-Claire Barker

He doesn’t know it, but Rory is responsible for one of the scariest moments of my career. His flight to an event was changed and I ended up talking after him. As we know, Rory can turn anything into entertainment. Brands. Crisp packets. Parking meters. Opera. Anything. Anyway, he sparkled and the crowd roared. Then it was my turn. My spot was called “The importance of typography in advertising”. Oh, dear.

Sid Tomkins

Got on a plane to the Carribean with Rory behind me working on his laptop. After 10 minutes, I heard loud snoring that nearly shook the entire cabin. Everyone looked at each other with smiles and knowing glances. I turned around to say something to Rory, only to find him to be the snoring culprit … with his fingers still perfectly placed on his keyboard.

Kent Wertime

The Wiki Man www.spectator.co.uk — 31.05.2008

‘Linda works miracles in the kitchen while Trevor is ubiquitous with the cup that cheers.’

This sentence has haunted me for 15 years. It’s from a parody of the typical reader’s review in The Good Food Guide, probably by Craig Brown. I still quote it gnomically when asked whether some restaurant or other is any good.

These reviews were usually written by the kind of people who preferred to purchase from an emporium than to buy from a shop. The word “peruse” was always a clue. “Reluctant to entrust navigation to my lady wife, I chose to peruse the atlas myself, necessitating the removal of my driving gloves.” Later, “ensconced in a nearby hostelry,” the writer would relax by “partaking of ales in the company of mine host.”

Back then, professional writers had little to fear from amateurs. Not only because space in print was necessarily limited, but also because non-professional writing was often dire. No longer. Never mind what you hear about declining standards; digital media has been wonderful for the written word.

Towards the end of the last century, many people wrote infrequently; when they did, their writing took on a kind of awkward ceremony — prose which no more reflected everyday speech than an Ascot hat resembles everyday dress. Now, thanks to email, blogs and other social media, real people write more often and so more naturally. (You’ll see this at www.b3ta.com/questions; misspelled, ill-punctuated, regularly obscene — but always readable.)

Unlike the purists, I’m less worried by English becoming too casual than by the opposite problem — when it evolves within closed groups. You find this in business, academia and politics, where people unthinkingly adopt the style and vocabulary of their tribe. Blairites were as bad as Marxists at this, loving meaningless words such as “outreach” or “inclusion.” But it’s not just lefties: any group which could use a euphemism such as ‘sub-prime’ without accompanying curly-quote finger actions was asking for trouble too. It’s why, to avoid lapsing into the shared-language and shared-thinking of bankers, Warren Buffett writes Berkshire Hathaway annual reports as though addressing his sister Bertie.

Online, thank God, the very mathematics of the world wide web act powerfully against groupspeak or argot. The nature of hypertext and the mechanics of search engines automatically give preference to the popularist above the specialist — and favour the clear and concise over the tortuous. By an almost Darwinian process, good writing is referenced and thus magnified while bad writing sinks from sight. Write for the many and you will be seen by many; write for the few and few will read you.

This is why the blogosphere, along with sites such as Wikipedia, has suddenly created a new outlet for writers who can explain complex ideas in simple terms. It’s why economics blogs (www.marginalrevolution.com and Robert Reich are good here) are read by hundreds of thousands. And why, when seriously ill with a man-cold last week, I happily spent my convalescence reading amateur explanations of Bayes’ Theorem and pricing theory (snipurl.com/spectator8 is as good an introduction to pricing as you’ll find anywhere). Like pornstars, journalists and other professionals, writers will soon find the output of talented amateurs posing a growing threat to their livelihoods. Trust me, I have no plans to give up the day job.

The Wiki Man www.spectator.co.uk — 13.12.2008

It’s not always a good idea to read certain books when you’re too young.

At school it didn’t occur to any of us that Brave New World was meant to be a bad place — it seemed like a utopian fantasy world to me. Advice to writers: if you want to alarm teenagers with the nightmarish prospect of a dystopian future, it’s a good idea not to fill it with really cool drugs and high-tech pornography.

More mature people, however, do worry about new technology, especially its effects on sex and morality. A tabloid scare a few years ago caused much hand-wringing about “internet child adoption”; all that had happened was that a childless couple had used the internet to find the telephone number of an adoption agency overseas, but the addition of the word “internet” made the event instantly more shocking, as though someone had started a kind of eBay for orphans. Every invention brings a backlash of warnings that it will erode the social restraints and inhibitions vital to civilised society. There is a Jacobean tract in which the writer preaches against the prospect of human flight for fear that, once men and women could move freely through the air, the roofs of churches would be covered with amorous couples. In 1897 a crowd of Cambridge undergraduates hanged an effigy of a woman opposite the Senate House to protest against the admission of women — and expressed their horror of liberated women by sitting the effigy on a bicycle (bit.ly/nuWc4F).

But are we worrying about the wrong things here? While we all agonise about moral issues, the most dangerous technology of recent years has spread without a voice raised against it. I am talking about the spreadsheet.

What the spreadsheet has done is to create in organisations and governments an over-reliance on numbers (by no means always meaningful or even accurate) with the result that often spurious numerical targets, metrics or values invariably override any conflicting human judgment. This has given rise to what a colleague of mine, Anthony Tasgal, calls “The Arithmocracy”: a powerful left-brained administrative caste which attaches importance only to things which can be expressed in numerical terms or on a chart.

Don’t misunderstand me. I am not making a trite “price of everything but value of nothing” point, nor am I attacking genuine science. I object to the spreadsheet precisely because of the pseudo-science involved, and the way numbers create a semblance of mathematical rigour which lends some measures or extrapolations an influence they don’t deserve. Einstein posted a sign in his office at Princeton which read, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

In spreadsheet-land everyone knows educational standards are falling — but “that’s fine because the pass rate is going up.” Bankers have instinctively known for years that something was wrong — but 1,000 screens twinkling with reassuring numbers have vetoed anyone from acting on their instincts.

We worry endlessly about how technology might give rein to our baser urges but give no thought at all to the dangers of excessive logic. Yet the Holocaust and the Soviet famine were both the product of meticulous government officials in dutiful pursuit of numerical targets. Italians, by and large, don’t go in for atrocities. It’s not mass hysteria that really frightens me, it’s mass rationality.

The Wiki Man www.campaignlive.co.uk — 12.03.2008

The medium isn’t just the message … the medium is the product.

One day I plan to publish a competitor to the Guide Michelin called the Guide Sutherland. It is designed to be a superlative guide to food — as we really like to eat it.

Rather than endlessly obsessing about the kind of trivial factors French people mistakenly believe to be important (such as high quality ingredients and subtle flavours) it will instead answer the really important questions about a restaurant. Questions such as: “does it do take-aways?” and “is there a drive-thru lane?”

You think I am joking? In which case answer these two questions: 1. What is the best restaurant you have ever been to in your life? 2. How often have you eaten there? My guess is your answer to question 2 is no more than 10 times. In which case ask yourself why, if this restaurant is so damn good, you have not eaten there more often than at, say, Wagamama or McDonald’s. My contention is that the ease and choice of delivery mechanism makes more difference to us (and quality of product far less difference) than we ever care to admit.

The Guide Sutherland will follow a star system similar to the Guide Michelin. One star will be awarded for the restaurant being possessed of adequate car-parking; another will be awarded if the restaurant offers a take-out or delivery service, or has a drive-thru lane. A third star will be awarded if it is open and serving food uninterruptedly between lunch and dinner (any restaurant which informs you that the chef has gone home at 2pm will be excluded automatically.) Finally a bonus (fourth) star will be awarded if the food is pleasant to eat.

The system works very well. Many branches of Wagamama score four stars; my favourite Indian restaurant, with its fine food and ample parking, scores three. Club Gascon scores two stars, being next to a large NCP. Most restaurants in France score very badly.

You probably think I am being whimsical or perverse. Absolutely not. For my experience of France is simply that, while the food there tends to be extraordinarily good, the inflexible approach to delivery makes eating it a massive pain in the arse. You have to turn up at very specific times, and the rigmarole is tiresome in the extreme. After a few days on holiday there, I usually end up going to McDonalds, Quick, Flunch or Buffalo Grill, partly for the convenience, and also because that’s where real French people eat out anyway, so it’s more authentic. The reason the French so eagerly adopt American concepts such as Starbucks or KFC is not because of the quality of the food but the flexibility of the delivery. If you doubt this, try going into a “classic” French cafe and asking for a coffee to go.

Okay, enough of this. Where am I going here? Quite simply I am repeatedly discovering something which will come as a surprise to conventional marketers, and comes as quite a surprise to me. It’s this. In determining the size, breadth, nature and reaction of your target audience, the medium of engagement is often far more important that what might conventionally be called the “core product offering.”

I first noticed this in my very early days as a direct marketer — we learned that allowing people to respond to a letter by telephone or by post, rather than insisting on one or the other, massively increased response to any mailing. Logically this seems strange: either you want an American Express card or you don’t — surely the option to request one by telephone should not make much difference. And yet it does. I noticed it the other day at McDonald’s — you will have seen the same thing yourself — where there was a massive queue at the drive-thru lane while the restaurant itself is almost empty. You would think the people at the back of the in-car queue would park and go inside and yet, either for reasons of channel-choice or sheer immobility, they don’t.

Let’s look at a few other surprises. How many McKinseyites routinely go to flea-markets or car-boot sales? Very few, I think it’s fair to assert. And yet the employees of large consulting firms are massive users of eBay. Once again, the medium is the product.

A similar encroachment into up-market territory happened as soon as low-cost airlines pioneered online booking. They did this to reduce costs, not to increase the customer base; to their surprise the online offer massively destigmatised low-cost travel for high-earning people. There was nothing inherently downmarket about low-cost travel — it was the business of hanging on a telephone for hours which was the problem.

We found a similar thing with charitable donations. “Young people don’t give to charity” was the conventional wisdom. And they don’t by post. They do by text. First Direct is yet another case of a great success being pioneered on the back of the mode of delivery, rather than the intrinsic merits of the product. DirectLine is another. Argos is a fabulous pioneer of multi-channel delivery; my 77-year-old father is a great devotee of “Ring & Reserve” and “Click & Collect.”

I have no beef with Royal Mail whatsoever. Despite constant whinges from the press, the actual product offer is really quite good. What is atrocious is not Royal Mail but the Post Office, who are woefully inflexible (indeed almost French) in the limited means they offer for sending a package. If just a few vending machines sold postal items or accepted items for delivery, or if just a few Post Offices were open on Saturday afternoons, I would be content. (In their defence, you can now pay and print your postage online, which would be a start, had the local receiving office not shut at noon.) Many state-run businesses are the same. Endlessly agonising about the supposed product while being woefully inflexible about how it delivered. You can get a pizza to your home at 11pm when you’re well, but try getting a doctor when you’re ill. I am amazed that suspicions concerning Dr Harold Shipman were not aroused several years earlier, when it became apparent he was the only GP in Britain still prepared to make house-calls.

The railways are similar in this respect. Once you’re on a train, they’re really quite good. But the barriers (literal and figurative) you must negotiate in order to get on that train are truly awful. But we can, for once, point to a few notable successes here. Illogically I have come to accept the congestion charge largely because — by text message — it is at least easy to pay. I was actively impressed by the ease of renewing my tax-discs online, and of confirming my presence on the electoral roll. I was marginally less grumpy about my tax demand when I found I could pay it online. I am also a noticeably less fervent avoider of public transport since the introduction of Oyster Pay As You Go.

It always reminds me of the comments of a colleague in Singapore, describing some spectacular example of government efficiency. “When they’re this good,” she said, “You almost don’t mind that you don’t get to vote for them.” So my tip for the day is this: spend just as much time working on how you can reduce consumer transaction costs as you do trying to reduce manufacturing costs. Could you get young people to save for a pension — if they could choose the monthly amount by SMS? Could you get people to travel more by train if it were possible to reserve a parking space? Maybe you only need the hard sell because your product isn’t easy to buy. People love easy more than they love cheap. As Bob Dylan says in Brownsville Girl: “People don’t do what they say they believe, they do what’s convenient and then they repent.”

The Wiki Man www.campaignlive.co.uk — 18.11.2007

Lets put sales promotion at the heart of the agency.

It has become almost universal — and for a very good reason — for advertising agencies to seek to reinvent themselves around digital media. But there is another discipline they may overlook in the process. Here are just four of many useless ideas I have come across this year at Ogilvy.

1. Rail companies should give everyone in their catchment area free off-peak travel on their birthdays. Our belief is that, for that vast number of people who never use the train, a free sampling campaign would cost almost nothing and would create a few converts.

2. Supermarkets should keep a small number of trolleys and baskets available half-way round the store, for those people who enter the shop empty-handed with the intention of buying only one or two things, and whose subsequent purchasing is limited by what they can carry. (This is vital in Boots, a place where many men feel the act of picking up a basket may bring their sexual orientation into question.)

3. All airport car parks should have a number of parking spaces which are three times more expensive than any others — so people can confidently head off to the airport knowing they will always find somewhere to park. This would extend to the rich, a luxury currently limited to the disabled.

4. The McPicnic — a family meal for McDonald’s complete with rug, a few games, etc., intended to be collected from the Drive-Thru and consumed outdoors, hence deurbanising fast food. (If you’re wondering what we’re doing working with McDonald’s, we weren’t: this was the product of a graduate training exercise.)

I call these ideas “useless” because I know (and this is partly why I am giving them away) that we do not stand a chance of selling them — or of seeing them happen. And the reason for this is simple: these are all behaviour changing ideas, not attitude shifting ideas. And the job of an agency is now just to do the attitude stuff, love.

Why? Perhaps agencies have so overplayed the “brand” justification for their activities that they have sometimes disqualified themselves from adding value to clients anywhere else. If the sole and single value of an activity is not “the brand,” it is seen as outside our area of competence. There are two dangerous assumptions in this: “We’re just paid to focus on the brand” approach.

First the whole “brand-led” approach is based on the dangerous assumption that behavioral change is the product of attitudinal change: in reality it happens more often the other way round. Or, as St Bob puts it in Brownsville Girl: “People don’t do what they say they believe, they just do what’s convenient and then they repent.”

The second assumption is just as dangerous: it is the dangerously linear assumption that the best way to build a brand is to set out to build a brand. I really don’t believe this. I think if you set out to build a great business, you’ll stand a fair chance of building a great brand. I am not equally confident that someone aspiring to build a great brand will build a great business.

To use a phrase popularised in a famous FT article: great brands are often built obliquely. They are generally a by-product of something (ideals, vision, focus) and not a product of anything.

Saying that you build a brand by setting out to build a brand is a little like saying that you can end poverty by giving poor people money. It doesn’t work like that. So in building a brand, don’t necessarily start by looking at the brand. Instead ask a broader marketing question: how can I turn human understanding into business advantage? This may mean that you start with the transaction and work back. It may mean you look at changing behaviour first and let perception follow. It may mean you have good business ideas and then brand them (Tesco have been masters of this).

Sales promotion agencies (the good ones) are familiar with this approach… that of: “make people buy and hopefully they’ll love you” rather than “make people love you and hopefully they’ll buy.” Their philosophy needs to be as much at the heart of what we do as any other.

The Wiki Man www.spectator.co.uk — 10.12.2008

Venetia Thompson & Rory Sutherland list the pointless luxuries and trends that will be culled by the recession.

Most journalists have spoken of the financial crisis as evidence of a failure of capitalism. But is it? Or is this kind of reversal in fact necessary if capitalism is to work at all? After all, a free-market economy doesn’t do a perfect job of rewarding success. It may pick better winners than, say, governments, but it is still largely arbitrary. Even relatively worthy successes such as Google’s or Microsoft’s may be as much the result of lucky timing as anything else. Instead, capitalism is at its indisputable best not when picking but when picking off. In unerringly killing off the bad: the inefficient, the redundant, the outdated or the needlessly complex.

Along with great increases in wealth and industry, the last 15 years of growth have seen a steady accumulation of pointless and unproductive forms of human activity:witless expenditure, insane trends and bizarre herd behaviours. Their disappearance will be welcome — not only to people who were forced to watch them, but even more to those many people who felt driven to participate. Already, there are signs some people are quietly welcoming the slackening off as the recession provides them with a welcome excuse to live less intensely.

1. The organic movement: vegetables, fruit, meat and fish simply weren’t expensive enough as they were. They had to become “organic”, produced without the use of certain pesticides and antibiotics, using the power of love alone to fend off whitefly and foot rot and in turn separate the classes: the poor eat the drug-pumped battery-farmed thighs and the rich feast on the organic, massaged-before-bedtime fillets. The reality is that most organic produce tastes the same, if not decidedly worse than the evil GM variety.

2. Property porn: The unquestioned assumption, widely propagated in countless television programmes, that home improvement is the highest form of self improvement. If we never again see another programme in which some vapid idiots mince around redecorating a house, our lives will have gone up in value by over 30%

3. Holidays in far-flung places: In an effort to upstage each other, rich people were obliged to visit increasingly far-flung and dangerous parts of the world on holiday. Machu Picchu is, in truth, a collection of ruined buildings that would be fairly irritating to visit even if you weren’t forced to suffer altitude sickness in order to do it. As Dr Johnson said of the Devil’s Causeway: “Worth seeing, but not worth going to see.” The same could be said of those luxury safaris in the middle of civil wars. There’s nothing six-star or bespoke about gangs of machete-wielding cannibal rebels hiding in the bushes.

4. Watches that cost more than a car: A £30 watch will answer your timekeeping needs perfectly — anything else is simply jewellery for men, and mostly of quite spectacular hideousness.

5. Restaurant deadlines: It is simply impertinent to tell you when you must finish your meal.

6. Coffee mania: Sometimes we like our coffee skinny, extra hot or tall, sometimes we just want it fast. Can espresso bars start serving just espresso again? Or failing that, Nescafé — especially at railway stations.

7. Skiing holidays: A ski trip is not a holiday. It is an exhausting, expensive, dangerous activity that consists of a week or two, or if you’re particularly unlucky an entire season, of falling off drag lifts, sliding face-down across patches of ice at speed, knocking people over while trying to get off chairlifts, followed by inedible meals, sleep depravation, a spot of frost-bite and never-ending family rows.

8. Insane working hours: The introduction of the American work ethic to the UK has had appalling effects on quality of life, and may be a welcome casualty of the recession. We have no particular urge to return to an age where the very act of working is seen as slightly vulgar — but the opposite is worse. And long work hours are dangerously self-reinforcing. As Joseph Stiglitz observed recently, the great problem destroying leisure today is the problem of co-ordination. In other words, there is no point in knocking off at 6pm when you know all your friends will be working until 8.30pm Before we adopt US working practices, we should remind ourselves that the white American genetic make-up is exclusively drawn from the most restless, obsessive, zealous, neurotic and friendless 5% of the European population. The reason the Pilgrim Fathers were forced to leave these shores had little to do with religion — it was because nobody liked them.

9. The veneration of financial services: For the last decade the assumption was that London’s sole destiny was to become a vast banking capital — a kind of bloated version of Frankfurt. No one was allowed to question whether this was desirable, or whether other industries where Britain has a comparative advantage (technology, in particular) were neglected in the process. And Tony Benn is right: there is no need for mainstream news programmes to report the hour-by-hour behaviour of the FTSE.

10. Women’s clothes: How many clothes and shoes do women need? The growth of this area of retail is malignant. On many streets in England now perhaps 80% of the shops are selling ugly women’s fashion. In a really deep recession they will be forced to reopen as poundshops, off-licences or tobacconists. Much better.

11. Second homes: A second home is not a necessary investment. For 15 years, everyone who somehow hadn’t bought a place in Devon, Cornwall, Italy or Spain felt they were missing out. And yet who really wants these encumbrances now they are no longer rising in value? Do you want to spend your precious fortnight’s holiday practising the Italian for “My septic tank appears to have exploded,” or swerving pastel-coloured rugby shirt-wearing loons driving Range Rovers at high speed around Salcombe? Surely the point of being rich is that you can go anywhere you want when you want to — rather than feeling obliged to revisit the same place every year, and be confronted with the kinds of people that you spend your time in London attempting to avoid.

12. The reporting of rising property prices as though this is universally good news: For most people (those at the stage of their lives when their next move is upwards) it is good news when property prices fall. The same applies to stock prices. Why the BBC reports all financial events from the standpoint of rich, retired shareholders owning large homes, we despair.

13. Champagne cocktails: A glass of champagne cannot be improved upon by adding fruit purée, sherbet around the rim, or an indoor sparkler, and then charging £15 plus 15% service for the privilege. All these things, and the ones that you add, form part of a wider economic question. To what extent are our wants and desires shaped contextually by the lifestyles of those around us, rather than by any absolute need? As Robert H. Frank, professor of economics at Cornell, asserts: “Local context shapes perception of quality, the demand for which knows no limits.” Or, in layman’s language: “When you’re surrounded by rich gits, it’s hard not to act like a bit of a git yourself.” When just a few of those gits lose their jobs, the rest of us, perversely, may become a lot better off.

The Wiki Man www.spectator.co.uk — 14.12.2009

It is wrong to equate the value of something with how much it costs. New technology for instance is cheap, and transforms our lives.

One of David Cameron’s ideas which may have fallen victim to the recession is the proposal to measure Britain’s success by some means other than GDP. When first proposed, the idea was linked to the famous remark of the king of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who had observed in the 1980s that “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product.” Cameron’s suggestion was that some more holistic measure of “Gross National Wellbeing” should replace the purely economic measure of GDP.

At a time of financial crisis, it would be easy to ridicule the suggestion that we all become less materialistic, especially when it comes from an Etonian — the kind of person who, in Harry Hills’ joke, “already had a castle so, for his birthday, his parents hired a bouncy council estate.” The idea isn’t helped by its Buddhist associations either: if you have just lost your job in Teesside, it can’t be much consolation to hear that you suddenly have a lot more spare time for sitting around saying “om” or dyeing everything saffron.

However, some recent findings suggest we should not abandon this line of enquiry quite yet — for, rather than killing it, the downturn may have proved the idea’s importance. Against all expectations, the latest findings from the United States seem to suggest that this latest recession has made people happier. Measures of happiness in the US hit previous lows in 1973, 1982, 1992 and 2001, all recession years, so you might assume that 2009 would be worse. In fact Time (tinyurl.com/yak6pyl) reports that the latest findings of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index show that, after an initial dip at the time of the crash, American happiness has now hit a record high.

Surprised? The author of the Time article, Nancy Gibbs, has a simple explanation for these findings. She calls it the end of “expectations inflation.” During a protracted period of economic growth, our expectations for the future grow at an even faster rate than our spending power. This inflation of our ambitions eats away at our happiness in exactly the same way as financial inflation erodes our savings. Her explanation, similar to Michael Eysenck’s concept of the Hedonic Treadmill, rings true. It may even suggest that the aim of “No more boom and bust” may have been a disaster for human happiness, since without the Damoclean threat of periodic downturns there is nothing to dampen our expectations or to encourage restraint. When every barely literate idiot operating a buy-to-let scheme seems to have made a fortune from it, everyone around them can feel a mug for not overextending themselves. Perhaps we need the occasional recession to reassure ourselves that nemesis is still at work. As Warren Buffett unforgettably put it, “It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.”

Of course questioning the metrics of economics is not new. In one of his sermons, Samuel Johnson can’t resist this swipe at Adam Smith: “There is a kind of mercantile speculation, which ascribes every action to interest, and considers interest as only another name for pecuniary advantage. But the boundless variety of human affections is not to be thus easily circumscribed.”

More recently psychologists and behavioural economists have also questioned the extent to which economic growth translates into greater human happiness once a certain level of material wealth has been attained. Kahneman recently sat on the immodestly named Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, a body convened by Nicolas Sarkozy with the aim of questioning the stranglehold that conventional measures such as GDP have over economic policy making.

The full report is available for download here: bit.ly/JTwmG.

But to anyone familiar with the digital world, there is no need to commission a 200-page report to realise that GDP is an increasingly wonky measure for our wealth and wellbeing. Because in the world of post-scarcity economics, where more and more of the goods we enjoy are consumed non-rivalrously, any logical connection between what things are worth and what we have to pay for them has long since disappeared.

To understand this, try this simple exercise — I call it the Louis XIV test: have a look around your house and imagine what Louis XIV would pay for everything you own.

Your house? He wouldn’t keep a horse in it. Your furniture? Complete rubbish. Your car? He’d like your car. But he’d give you half of Burgundy in exchange for the small telly in your bedroom.

Or take the value of Wikipedia. The creation of this is more or less akin to installing a Bodleian library in every house in Britain. Does this massive new wealth register on GDP figures? Not a blip. Or the new availability of blogs and podcasts. Tremendous writers who, just a decade ago, would have been lecturing to half-empty theatres are now read by hundreds of thousands. Again, almost no money changes hands, so not a wiggle in the GDP figures.

To put a value on the digital world by only tallying the money that changes hands is a little like trying to place a value on sex by simply measuring the amount spent on prostitution.

What about the introduction of BBC iPlayer or the SkyPlayer. One day you wake up and find you can now choose from ten times more television than the day before. How much does this cost? Maybe a few pence on the licence fee. There is a cute little game you can download for your iPhone, called Harbor Master. It costs 69p to download. And yet it has given me more fun and distraction than things for which I have paid hundreds of pounds. Again, the digital economy is different.

There is a train information service where you text, say: “Paddington to Reading 1500” to 84950 and it texts you back the train times and whether any are running late. It’s saved me hours of wasted time. Each use costs 25p.

Footballers, who may earn a few hundred thousand pounds a week, come home to their eager WAGs and a stable full of Bentleys and find the most enjoyable thing they can do is play Grand Theft Auto — something you can buy for £20.

You may sneer at a few of these examples. Fine. But, as well as providing low-cost entertainment the digital world has ushered in a massive and largely unmentioned reawakening of cultural and intellectual interest.

One colleague of mine calls this trend “dumbing up.” Radio 4 now has over ten million unique listeners each month. Events such as the Intelligence Squared debates sell out. More people go to public libraries in the course of a month than go to football matches. Suddenly reading groups are everywhere.

Apple iTunes even contains a whole area called iTunesU (the U stands for University) where ordinary members of the public can download lectures and educational content, again for free.

Some experts attribute this change to a fundamental shift in human behaviour — where in displays of status, intelligence is supplanting wealth as the principal currency. Perhaps this is because, in a networked world, it is far easier to demonstrate intelligence than before. And also because the idea of wealth as a measure of deserving talent has taken rather a knock in the last two years. If people choose to shift their status-seeking efforts from the acquisition of goods to the acquisition of knowledge and culture, would this be a tragedy, even if it caused GDP to fall? Would it necessarily be a disaster if people chose to trade wealth for leisure?

Let’s put the question another way: it would be perfectly possible for Europe to grow its GDP by four per cent or so next year simply by adopting the North American habit of taking only two weeks holiday, yet is there anyone in Europe who would willingly make this trade? Here’s hoping a Cameronian government will visit this vital question just as Sarkozy has done.

The Wiki Man www.campaignlive.co.uk — 05.09.2008

Is advertising the problem? Or is advertising the solution?

There is a universally-held belief that advertising makes people want more things. This may indeed be true. But an equally important (and perhaps even more lucrative) use of advertising is to make people content with less.

This year I have been mostly reading about behavioural economics (bit.ly/3l3OUc). I find the subject endlessly fascinating. Partly because the subject offers up endless counter-intuitive insights into human behaviour of the kind which research companies should generate but frankly never do (the fact, for instance, that in defiance of economic rationality, prostitutes almost always end up losing any clients whom they offer to serve for free* — I mean you don’t generally get that from Millward Brown, do you?)

The other reason I am captivated is a more self-interested one: I suspect it is the new behavioural-economic models which will form the model for the most successful (or at least the most interesting) agencies in the next 10 years. Why? Partly because this subject provides a robust intellectual link between understanding human nature and knowing how to make money, which is the only proper area of study for anyone in marketing (remember when we used to sell things?) Secondly, unlike the models prevalent in marketing, behavioural economics hasn’t been designed to suit the needs of one media solution. Thirdly, I like it because it offers a practical alternative to the “messaging model” of advertising which everyone good in this business (see Russell Davies in last week’s Campaign, or Paul Feldwick and Robert Heath passim) admits is a heap of old crap.

In fact behavioural economics offers the only current model I see capable of displacing the current lazy consensus around “how advertising works.” As such it is vitally important since as every scientific historian knows, the only way to kill off an entrenched model is by replacing it with a new one.

There is another reason it’s useful. Quite simply economics has an extensive and precisely defined vocabulary (in stark contrast to marketing language where the word “brand” can mean three entirely different things within the same sentence). For instance in the last month I have learned about “Veblen Goods”, “inferior goods” and “Giffen goods.” (The idea of the Giffen good is fascinating, but I don’t propose to cover it here.

The Veblen good, meanwhile, is a kind of product or service named after a rather austere looking Norwegian-American, one Thorstein B. Veblen, a distinguished economist perhaps most famous for coining the phrase Conspicuous Consumption (bit.ly/ekvNj).

Veblen goods are those items which defy the usual price-laws of supply and demand because demand for them seemingly increases as their price goes up; indeed it is their high price and corresponding rarity which largely gives them their value. Caviar, an immensely expensive product which is decidedly less enjoyable to eat than, say, a packet of salt ‘n’ vinegar crisps, would be a good example of such an item. “Reassuringly expensive,” the 30-year-old strapline for Stella Artois, is an elegant attempt to create a Veblen good using two words.

Sometimes the value of a Veblen good lies in its display or status value. The “I am rich” iPhone application (fxn.ws/QHPzU) would be an extreme example of this. Sometimes it may be simple human snobbery which believes that a rarer, pricier item will be better (the American Institute of Wine Economics has found that the safest way to guarantee enjoyment of wine is simply to tell the drinker that it cost a lot of money).

I here quote Wikipedia: “The Veblen effect is one of a family of theoretically possible anomalies in the general theory of demand in microeconomics. Other related effects include the snob effect: preference for goods because they are different from those commonly preferred; in other words, for consumers who want to use exclusive products, price is quality; the bandwagon effect: preference for a good increases as the number of people buying them increases; although some have suggested that there is also a ‘counter-Veblen’ effect: preferences for goods increasing as their price falls, this is in essence merely traditional supply and demand theory.“

An “inferior good”, finally, is one which people generally buy less of when they get a bit richer. Polyester or coach travel would be generally regarded as inferior goods. This distinguishes them from normal goods, of which people buy more when they get richer — such as, say, holidays.

Got that? Right, now an almost universally held criticism of advertising is that most of it exists to amplify Veblen effects, and in particular that it prompts people to want things they don’t need and can’t afford. Worse, it promotes a kind of consumerist arms-race with everyone seeking to outdo each other in displays of conspicuous consumption.

My own belief? We all believe this — even advertising’s most ardent defenders, don’t we? And indeed advertisingcan do this. But in my opinion it very rarely does. In fact it is far more likely to have the opposite effect.

Okay, let’s accept there is an economic case to be made for disliking conspicuous consumption, since (intentionally or not) it may create more net envy and misery in bystanders than it creates happiness in the consumer, while leading to elaborate forms of expenditure which are in many ways wasteful and unproductive (eg most women’s fashion, two parking spaces at Harrods, that kind of thing). Certainly Veblen himself, being an austere Nordic type, disliked conspicuous consumption.**

But let’s assume that Veblen effects are bad. Does advertising do much to create them?

Just a few points. There were Veblen effects long before there was advertising. People have worn extravagant regalia or eaten expensive food to demonstrate status and wealth since the beginnings of human life and perhaps before (large antlers are probably a Veblen good). The women’s clothes and footwear industries are extraordinary examples of conspicuous consumption, but this predates advertising by a few millennia (sumptuary laws were introduced five hundred years ago to limit which cloths such as silk could be worn by which ranks of society). In some cases mass advertising may actually destroy the rarity value a Veblen good seeks to create.

People who despise consumerism and advertising are usually just as guilty (possibly far more so) of seeking status through Veblen effects. The Guardian-reader who shops organically and holidays in Macchu Picchu is far more guilty of displaying rarity-snobbery than a Sun reader who goes to Burger King and Benidorm. Even if the first three are not overtly commercial, they are status seeking activities nonetheless. Fashion and luxury goods advertising is very rarely done by ad agencies. Nor is most advertising for upmarket or luxury products. In fact for the most part Veblen goods are not promoted through advertising at all, but PR. Why would you spend £20,000 to advertise a $50,000 Ecological Treehouse when the Sunday Times will happily run a stupid article on them, next to a piece on funny-shaped swimming pools and holidays in Uzbekistan. And when the wonderfully non-commercial BBC will run hours of programming dedicated to the proposition that if your house doesn’t have decking or a tossy water-feature then you’re a loser.

Against this backdrop a few purchases stand as a glorious counter to innate materialism. Things which ought to have become inferior goods but somehow aren’t. Things which are the very opposite of Veblen goods — indeed they manifest bandwagon effects or possibly even counter-Veblen effects. They are wonderful social levellers. I’ll name some of them now: IKEA, McDonald’s, CocaCola, Mini, LeviStrauss, The Ford Ka, Marlboro lights, easyJet, Pizza Hut, Gap, M&S, Tropicana, John Lewis, BT, Nokia, BP, Tesco, BA, Heinz Baked Beans, Nike, Kelloggs, Sony, Vodafone, Tabasco, Sky, Toshiba,

Apple iPod, Volvo, Google, Centerparks, Virgin and Disney.

Spend a moment comparing, if you will, how incredibly democratic the soft drinks market is (mass production, mass distribution, mass advertising) compared to the market for wine (niche production, niche distribution, no advertising). The first is a model of egalitarianism, the second is riven by snobbery and status seeking. Remember Andy Warhol’s beautiful insightful comment: “What I like about Coke is that the President of the United States can’t get a better Coke than the bum on the street.” (True also of Google, incidentally.) Do you think the Prime Minister drinks the same wine as the local wino?

Fat chance.

Notice also how these democratic mass brands are disproportionately American (with healthily Protestant additions from Scandinavia and the UK). The egalitarian French, meanwhile, are busy promoting luxury brands.

What fascinates me about these big brands is how astoundingly democratic they are, how devoid of any snobbery. Levi’s denim (it’s a rough, working man’s fabric, for God’s sake) should by rights be an inferior good, and yet it is worn equally by millionaire rock stars and impoverished accountants. In fact, amazingly, almost all of these brands enjoys what you might call the Cornwall effect — even if you’re a billionaire, it’s still okay to go there.

Some of you may quibble about McDonald’s. I accept that (and I wouldn’t have put it in the list myself until yesterday when I found myself queueing in the Drive-Thru lane behind a Lamborghini Diablo).

More important still, many of these advertised brands actually embody the counter-Veblen effect (IKEA, Tesco, easyJet are kind of cool because they are cheap — a characteristic once described as rational chic). This is also true of the Mini. These are all items which, no matter how rich you are, carry no stigma whatsoever.

So the peculiar irony is that big advertised brands, since they depend on mass distribution, ubiquity and fame, have it in their interests to be universal, democratic and non-Veblen. It is the unadvertised things which are divisive.

Large scale advertising may often work not by persuading people to trade up to more expensive variants, but in persuading them to keep their mass tastes instead. The idea that advertising creates social division may be quite wrong. Diametrically wrong, in fact. Advertising often works by persuading the market to adopt an efficient consensus solution, rather than fragmenting inefficiently and snobbishly.

It is, in a way, persuading people to be happy with less, rather than wanting more (brands, as I have remarked before, are environmentally very friendly — they require only electrons and neurons in their manufacture). Advertising is hence diminishing excess materialism by helping forge a common standard of “what’s pretty good for all of us.” And it prevents the inefficient creation of Inferior Goods — where people reject perfectly good solutions simply because they are “common” — and of Veblen Goods, the expensive things which people don’t need.  Advertising is, in its way, pro-beer and anti-wine.

So don’t apologise, adland. Stick to your guns. And keep up the good work. We need far more advertising — and far more categories of expenditure where mass advertised mass brands render the category socially acceptable to all, destroying pointless and inefficient fragmentation in the pursuit of price discrimination. Indeed George Monbiot believes part of the solution to global warming is to make coach travel cool (now there’s a brand opportunity for someone). For Polyester I suspect it is too late.

How do I know I’m right? Well I once got a room full of lefties to admit through clenched teeth that Karl Marx would have despised the organic movement, but would have loved McDonald’s.

Remember Andy Warhol on Coke. A mass advertised brand is as close to egalitarianism as we’ll ever get. Yes people are tortured by social anxiety. But these things do not concern mass brands, which are a wonderful source of reassurance. My iPod is just as good as Steve Jobs’s iPod. Anxieties and consumerism revolve around the areas where there are too few brands, not too many. Healthcare. Housing. Education. Travel. I wish Stelios would hurry up and open a school. I’d send my kids there in a shot.

* The suggestion is that any form of discount or freebie moves the trick from the purely transactional realm (where the only currency is financial) into the social realm (where the currency is partly emotional). Clients wish to pay prostitutes in full to make clear that this is purely a financial transaction with no emotional component whatsoever.

** Having said which, it’s worth remembering that the commissioning of much of the world’s greatest art and architecture was probably motivated by no higher motive than the display of wealth - while the vanity which drives people to buy the latest fashions, cars or gadgetry funds

innovation which fairly rapidly permeates to the lower end of the market. I can still remember the review of a new Rolls Royce in my childhood in which the reviewer was almost scandalised by the decadence of remotely adjustable wing-mirrors - something you would now get as standard on an £8,000 car, along with other shameful indulgences such as air conditioning or electric windows.

The Wiki Man www.campaignlive.co.uk — 01.03.2009

The great unanswered question of the age.

And, interestingly, it is a comedian who finally asks it. (youtu.be/8r1CZTLk-Gk)

Here you see the famous Boston comedian “Louis CK” appearing on the Conan O’Brien show. He is making fun of the “generation of assholes” who “feel the world owes them something they knew existed only ten seconds ago.” The 500,000 views this clip has received on YouTube suggest I am not the only person who thinks he may have a point.

And he is asking the very question which should rightly preoccupy the waking hours of anyone who works in technology marketing, indeed anyone who works in marketing … actually make that anyone who lives in a market economy …

What in God’s name is the point of all this brilliant innovation if it brings so little enduring joy?

Bill Gates voiced a similar concern when he observed that “people don’t know how to want the things we can offer them.” But I don’t have so much of a problem with people not embracing innovation — that’s their right, after all. I’m more concerned with the indifference they show towards innovations two weeks after they have adopted them.

You could call it the Paul Arden* question: “How can people more fully appreciate the magic and wonder they already have around them?” As advertising experts, we are supposed to be the authorities on adding perceived value to things. So we should ask ourselves why the public’s appreciation of most things (especially those things provided by private enterprise)  is so woefully low. Ask people about their mobile phone, their Sky+, their broadband connection … goods which would have seemed miraculous to our grandparents … and within a minute or so you’ll be listening to morose complaints about the monthly bill.

It seems to me that, if we were seeking gratitude rather than money, most capitalists would have given up the game decades ago. 60 years ago, under communism, a few million Russians were happy to die for the right to queue for a potato. Today, in a market economy, people who buying a microwave oven for £70 at 2 o’clock in the morning complain if they have a three minute wait.

It also occurs to me that the premise of most consumer journalism may be completely wrong. Implicit in the activities of organisations such as “Which?” or programmes such as “You and Yours” is the assumption that consumers are blameless and rational individuals who are in permanent danger of being misled by evil corporations. I am reluctantly coming to the conclusion (as are a few scientists, I might add) that corporations do an okay job: it’s the individual human who needs more serious investigation.

The rich (or anyone richer than average) are worse offenders than most, here. If you are wealthy, you will find the price of almost all consumer goods set at a level to sell in large quantities to a mass market — in other words at a price aimed at people much poorer than you. This means that a man earning £50,000 a year pays a price for his new flat-screen LCD TV that has been set be within the reach of people earning £20,000 a year — a price typically several hundred pounds lower than the rich man would be prepared to pay. This difference (known as the consumer surplus) seems to bring no added happiness at all. It’s as if rich people were given a £200 refund every time they bought a major purchase, and merely shrugged it off. I recently asked a professor from Caltech and a couple of other behavioural economists why this is no. No-one seems sure — but they admitted it is a major loss of potential happiness.

The brutal question underlying all this is simple. For all the talk about “value not price”, do people have any genuine appreciation of value at all? Or is our only conception of wealth and fortune not absolute but merely relative (do we inhabit a world where, as one economist famously observed: “a rich man is anyone who earns more than his wife’s sister’s husband.”)

This is a vitally important area of study for us. Partly because, if only at a small level, brand value might be one rare example when products are successfully imbued with a certain amount of added emotional enjoyment. But we need to know much more about this issue.

Do you think the problem is societal? Or is it innate? And, either way, what can we do about it?

*I call this the Paul Arden question after a story from William Burdon, which appears on the tributes page to Paul Arden .”…On the way home, we were getting pissed at Bordeaux airport, and asked each other what could be the greatest gift you could give your children. Moray and I gave some kind of inane account man answer, “Ferrari” I suspect.

Paul’s answer was “a sense of wonder.”

The Wiki Man www.spectator.co.uk — 09.04.2011

“You’re never alone with a Strand.”

“You’re never alone with a Strand”, created by the S.H. Benson agency in 1959, is now famous as the most unsuccessful advertisement ever. With its raincoated figure standing alone on Albert Bridge, seeking solace from some unseen misfortune by drawing on a Strand cigarette, it was admired on artistic grounds until it emerged that the imagery depressed not only viewers but also sales. In our defence (S.H. Benson later merged with Ogilvy & Mather), the Strand was also a lousy-tasting cigarette.

There are many historical cases where attempts at persuasion have backfired. The ballad The Wild Rover, never in my experience sung sober, was written as a temperance song. Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney character, intended as an indictment of Thatcherite materialism, became a mascot for city bankers. And, reading it at school, I thought Huxley’s Brave New World seemed a great improvement over real life in Monmouth.

The game Monopoly also belongs in this category. Before Clarence Darrow made his fortune from cut-throatcapitalist roleplay, a forerunner had been launched as The Landlord’s Game by Lizzie Magie in 1904, with the aim of educating players about the failings of capitalism, in particular the burdens imposed on workers by the owners of land. Magie was a Georgist, believing a tax on property should replace most other forms of taxation (actually a sensible idea which should be supported by any Londoner under the age of 50). The game was intended to attack the very behaviours it encouraged.

After reading about Magie (snipurl.com/magiegame) try Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal. McGonigal is a computer games designer, and a practitioner of the newly named science of “gamification”, the idea that the study of games has much to teach us about society and human motivation, and that we should apply lessons from game design to improve real life.

Even though I don’t like the word, I think gamification is worth exploring. A few years ago a mathematician friend explained to me that the game of tennis is enjoyable to watch only because of the scoring system. If players swapped serve alternately, and the tally worked as in basketball, (Nadal now leads Murray by 127 points to 43; new balls please) it would be almost unwatchable. But because tennis breaks the score into watertight compartments, namely games and sets, it creates a structure wherein a losing player feels he is still in with a chance right to the end. That makes the narrative of the game far more enjoyable to fans and players. And because some rounds (break-points, set-points) are more

critical than others, tennis’ moments of high tension are interspersed, as in a good play or opera, with quieter moments when players and spectators can relax a little.

Would society be better if life’s rewards resembled tennis rather than basketball? Imagine the opposite: a sport where points scored in the first ten minutes counted ten times more than any subsequent ones. You would make a frantic effort to establish an early lead, and then stop trying. What you have there is pretty much the system in France, where a stellar academic performance and a cushy public-sector job at the age of 25 (or their absence) largely seals the course of your life.

Or, by contrast, is it true that football, with its absurdly monolithic scoring system (where at any moment a triumph can turn into disaster) induces in fans and players a tension which often turns to violence? Certainly high-stakes societies, with rapid social mobility in both directions, are less placid than, say, Scandinavia. Cricket is odd here. Why does a six not count for more?

A British dislike of showing off, perhaps.

The Wiki Man www.campaignlive.co.uk — 20.04.2009

Why creatives should wear ties occasionally.

One of the most disturbing advertisements of the last few months is the single page ad for the iPhone:“Solving life’s little problems one app at a time.” Frankly this advertisement contravenes all the guidelines for contemporary press advertising. It contains a large shot of the product so you know what it looks like, carries a headline which discloses a consumer benefit and, worst of all, it contains a series of little captions (old direct marketing hands will know them as “call-outs”) wherein a number of words are arranged in some grammatical order to convey to the reader useful information about what the product does.

Jesus, I hope this sort of thing doesn’t get out of hand. Where could it end? If you’re not careful, you’ll have readers going to the shops in their droves and exchanging their money for iPhones.

Fortunately, I don’t think this will last for long. Soon we’ll be back to sanity — with shaven headed women leering out of the page displaying their tongue-piercings beneath incomprehensible two-word headlines. Why is this perfectly sensible kind of advertising so rare? One problem may be that the same creative brief is often written for print as for TV. I’m not sure this makes sense perhaps the kind of low-involvement, image-intensive brief which works well in film may be ill suited to the high involvement medium of print. Another problem may be that the “brevity is always best” assumption that has become a reasonable rule of thumb in poster advertising has by now completely infected press.

But there may be a simpler question at stake here. Are we trying too hard to make press ads cool? Perhaps the best thing you can do when writing a good press ad is to abandon any attempt at being even remotely hip. Put on a suit and tie. Read the Daily Mail. Go foxhunting for a day. Visit Croydon. Push Pineapple. Shake the tree. Grind coffee.  To the left, to the right, jump up and down and to the knees. Come and dance every night, sing with a hula melody. But do not, even for a second, consider going to Magma.

You can do almost anything in press. You can do intelligent, witty, urbane, posh, intelligent, popularist, large breasts, innuendo, informative, helpful, educational, belly—laughs, puns, logic, outrage. But it’s hard to do cool. Or, to be more precise, you can do cool, but the line between being cool and being a self-indulgent twat is perilously narrow. Remember that when you fail to be cool you alienate everyone — the cool people who hate you for failing and the uncool people who hate you for even trying.

At which point, a bigger question: is it even sensible for most brands to try to be cool at all? Just remember that in pursuing cool-hunters you are chasing the most fickle market that exists. Cool people do not even form a market that is even specially large or wealthy — and it is by definition fragmented. It may or may not be influential — that varies. But usually the best financial return to be derived from brands is best achieved by having, in Tim Harford’s words: “a strong brand in a conservative market.”

The single most important financial and social role which brands play is that they create new possibilities — for brand owners and consumers alike. People who are fashionable and experimental will try new things anyway. But strong mainstream brands radically change the behaviours of the many millions of people who are temperamentally less adventurous.

You wouldn’t have got a few million people to buy the Focus, the S-Max or the Ka (all radical designs) had they been branded Alfa Romeo. And, if it weren’t for Sainsburys, olive oil would still be sold only in chemists’ shops.

If we were true to our belief in brands, the dress code for the D&AD awards would stipulate M&S suits.

The Wiki Man www.campaignlive.co.uk — 20.08.2007

Perhaps we were better when we were smashed.

Get Smashed, the new book by Sam Delaney (amzn.to/3pdrUu), is a very necessary record of the advertising industry’s fast-fading memory…

It is at once immensely funny and very slightly depressing. Depressing because every anecdote reminds the reader of an embarrassing but significant truth: that our business in many ways did a better job when it wasn’t so busy pretending to be grown up. Or sober.

There are many explanations for this. The usual suspects (media fragmentation, blah, power of the retailers, blah) may have played their part. But, when I reread this email from Neil French, another more interesting explanation occurred to me. There’s no nice way of saying this. But I rather suspect our newfound earnestness and sobriety are inimicable to the business of building great brands. Might we perhaps be more valuable to our clients if we worked less and drank more?

Here is the main thrust of Neil’s email: “The German General Staff [the story goes] used to divide army officers into four categories: the clever and lazy, the clever and hard-working, the stupid and lazy and the stupid and hard-working. The best Generals, the Germans found, came from the clever and lazy; the best staff officers emerged from the clever and hard-working; the stupid and lazy could be made useful as regimental officers; but the stupid and hard-working were a menace, to be disposed of as soon as possible.”

Maybe, just maybe, intelligent laziness is just as valuable a commodity in advertising agencies as in the German High Command?

Let me put it this way: can you point to a single brand which has really suffered because it has stuck with the same strategy and creative approach for too long? Because it has changed tack too rarely? Because it has retained an old endline? In fact can you actually point to more than five UK brands that have persisted in the same advertising approach for the past decade? Back in the 1970s the very method of agency remuneration rewarded intelligent idleness. To produce a few film executions that ran and ran was a route to riches. Next best was to sink the budget in a single, long-running campaign. Nowadays a system of payment by the hour rewards a kind of fatuous industry. You see this take shape in complex, endlessly reworked strategies, generally following something you might call the “path of most resistance.”

As an aside, American government buildings are the only buildings on the world where lavatories and washrooms are often not stacked above each other on successive floors — a universal practice in the private sector where it serves to minimise plumbing. The reason? The US government pays builders and plumbers by the hour, not by the job. More industrious stupidity, in other words. Yet we do the same thing by separating planning from creative development — and who cares, so long as it adds to the length of our mental pipework?

I might go further: is the single most valuable function of the advertising agency to be a dampener on client activity? To discourage new initiatives and exciting new developments? And can it no longer play this role for fear that the budgets simply migrate to those ever so energetic people in new media, promotion or whatever?

Actually would the perfect agency be one so fantastically drunk and obstreperous that the pain of working with them would force clients to focus their entire marketing communications into one or two simple messages?

Like the good old days, in other words. Next week I plan to extend this theory further — by explaining why the whole idea of strategy in advertising is probably a mistake. Unlike 1.) A big ideal or 2.) an executional device (a puppy, say) a strategy is just the kind of middle-sized thought that will tempt any incoming marketing director to meddle with it. If you want a long-lived brand, avoid strategy altogether — instead have an Ideal (like Nike, Apple) or an executional device (Andrex, The Economist). Anything with a strategy is doomed never to outlive your client. Discuss.

The Wiki Man www.campaignlive.co.uk — 06.08.2008

Who make better planners? Planners or creatives?

This was the debate at the IPA on Monday evening (bit.ly/oyybWY). David Golding vs Dave Trott. And, my sweet Lord, was it good! Quite possibly among the best single hours I have spent at an event in my working life.

I also however have a slightly odd take on this argument (if I were a planner I would probably describe my stance as being Feuerabendian). My position is that I completely accept the value which planners and other specialists can add to the creative output of an agency — and I believe that varied groups of people are a good thing. But I believe our current, sequential approach to using different talents is a dreadful way to use our mix of talents to best effect.

In a single sentence my view is “Planning + Creative = Good. Planning > Creative = Bad.”

In short I believe that the way our business now tends to make “being interesting” subordinate to “being logical” is the single greatest reason why a lot of advertising is awful (and explains why the number of people who “believe the ads are as good as the programmes” has been in constant decline for over 20 years).

Put another way, when given a choice between post rationalisation and pre-rationalisation, I’d choose post-rationalisation 80% of the time.

Here goes:

1. I think there are really only two types of people in advertising agencies. Good people and crap people. Hence I am a little wary of debates about “what sort of crap people should we employ — crap planners or crap creatives.” It’s more important to have good people than to obsess about what they do. If I were a septic, I would quote Vince Lombardi here: “Hire the best athletes” was his mantra. He simply drafted the best people, without much caring whether they were quarterbacks, running-backs, line backers, motherf**kers or whatever else you have in the NFL. Incidentally our business of charging by the hour makes it difficult to hire except by specialism, which is a problem.

2. There are many, many ways of solving a business problem. Your solution could be reached through highly analytical means or purely creative means; by interrogating a database or by interrogating your mum. None of these is right or wrong, better or worse. I would argue that if you are turning human understanding into business advantage for your clients, you’re doing a good job; if you’re not, you’re not. You can do this with a marker pen; equally you can do it with a spreadsheet. In fact I eccentrically believe data analysis and really good statistical modelling can be immensely creative — because, just like a good creative team, well-worked data can reveal wonderfully unexpected, unasked for truths. In Freakonomics the guns vs swimming pools insight is arrived at numerically, but it is no less an astoundingly original thought for being uncovered by computers. Never forget this, folks: turbo-charged logic is a valid form of creativity.

3. Good agencies should be entirely open minded as to how they solve a problem. Via persuasion, behaviourism, business insight, econometric modelling, wild creative leaps, economic theory, anthropology, technology, media insights, by design, PR, promotions, digital… (Dave T’s Sainsbury’s pitch story was tremendous at illustrating this.) I also agree entirely with DT in that “brand” should not be — as it seems to have become — the default starting point for all thinking, though it should patently direct the way the solution is implemented.

4. A better mix of people will hence have a better chance of arriving at an optimal solution. Interestingly, diverse groups, according to recent behavioural research, seem to work rather well at problem solving — homogeneous groups are a catastrophe. Hence Planners alongside Creatives seem a better idea than Planners then Creatives. (Neither, by the way, is as good as Planners+Creatives+Media, which is what we had before a bunch of greedheads discovered you could make 1% more money from clients by supplying them with disjointed solutions.)

5. So far a stalemate, right? No. And here’s where I side with Dave. What I am saying above is that all means of arriving at solutions are equally valuable. Fair? And yet our processes and thinking are inherently biased towards the rational and away from the creative. How so?

6. Notice that all creative people have to present and justify their thinking to rational people. This does not usually apply the other way round. I have never seen a creative person given the chance to critique a media schedule or a budget. Yet media buyers are routinely asked what they think of the ads.

7. It is assumed that the process starts with rationality and eventually moves to creativity. Why necessarily this way round? Why not work in parallel, or even in reverse? A good scientist (DT quoted Einstein) will acknowledge that more than 50% of scientific breakthroughs are reached through post-rationalised ideas, not through sequential logic. Okay, you have to pretend to clients that you reached the solution in sequential order, because anything else makes them nervous. The same applies if you present a scientific breakthrough to the Royal Society — you can’t start a paper with the words: “I was sitting in my lab one night and I, like, had this idea, right …” But it is fundamentally a benign lie. This may explain why many advertising successes are arrived at despite the established process, not because of it — and why pitches are more fun than real work.

8. Because of this sequence bias, in many cases the brief can be excessively simplified or overcomplicated before a creative even gets a whiff of it. (Much great advertising was made to a promise so simplistic — eg. Heineken is refreshing — that no planner would feel they had added much value by writing it.) David assumed that creatives would always leap to certain default solutions without planning input — eg. Land Rover advertising always boiled down to military/safari/mud/dust. But are they wrong? Most of the best Land Rover advertising generally features some mud. I owned one of the damn things for three years and suffered the pain of 16mpg because it felt like Rorke’s Drift on Wheels. I’m not sure the creatives weren’t right.

9. Creatives are often paid on a project basis while Planners and Account People are on retainer. This is a complete con. It effectively says: “why don’t the rest of us feel free to ponce about on your business for months — and we’ll just drag a couple of creative people in at the last minute if it’s absolutely necessary to execute something.”

10. DT observes that creatives would rather produce something irrelevant and visible rather than irrelevant and visible. You could view this as a criticism. But in a media fragmented world what DT described as the instinctive creative approach (ie “let’s make something people will like and see how we can put it to good use”) makes more and more sense compared to “let’s spend weeks determining precisely what we want to say and then ask a creative team to try not to make it dull,” which is often the default approach when you start with planning and move sequentially to creative thinking.

So, in a sentence, I think both disciplines are equally valuable. But I think creativity needs affirmative action more than planning does. In particular, the assumption that planning always gets to work on the problem first shows an inherent bias in our thinking which is not only uncreative, it’s also downright unscientific.

As one creative (Chris Wilkins?) remarked to a planner:“You and I both drink from the same well of inspiration. The difference is that you get to piss in it first.”

The Wiki Man www.campaignlive.co.uk — 14.12.2009

Do people in the music industry understand music? And do people in the advertising industry understand brands?

Everyone is familiar with the experience: you go into a record shop and are treated with disdain because of your drearily mainstream tastes. Or, in the days when they existed, you wandered into a video rental shop and irritated the cinephile staff by renting Titanic.

The Onion even parodies this effect (onion.com/ndonK7). So did Not the Nine O’Clock News with the legendary “Gramophone” sketch (bit.ly/Lp9NC). The point that these sketches make is that, in any field, the difference between an expert and the ordinary public is not just a difference of degree — it is a yawning gulf of mutual incomprehension.

So, for instance, the only people not to like the film Mamma Mia are film critics. The only people not to like ABBA are music journalists (or wannabe music journalists). And the only people not to like JK Rowling and Dan Brown are pretentious literary types. Like me.

Just occasionally there are people who manage to attract both the high-brow and the mainstream (in a 30 year old survey of high-brow and low-brow literary heroes, Raymond Chandler was the only man to make it onto both lists). But this is rare.

What’s going on? Happily, I think behavioural economics (you weren’t expecting that, were you?) and the idea of the paradox of choice may help us understand this gulf. (bit.ly/n32MA)

If you are an expert in a field, you are a maximiser. Your car is Teutonic. You listen to relatively obscure Indie music. You wear niche clothes brands, like those funny jeans with a wiggle on them. You eat at restaurants you have learned about through recommendation or reviews. And go on holiday somewhere other than Spain, France or the USA. The maximiser seeks to find the very best of everything, and uses his consumption choices to define himself or herself apart from other people. The maximiser makes his choices with the aim of outdoing his or her peer group — to compete with other maximisers and to be differentiated from them.

The person I have depicted above may be one person. Some people are fearsomely competitive in everything. But most people tend to be maximisers in a few areas only — for most of us it’s simply too much intellectual effort to compete in every field. Moreover, most people tend to be maximisers in those fields where they know a great deal about the subject, or in the field where they are employed. If you work in the music industry, say, and compete for advancement with a bunch of people who have “just discovered a new Peruvian funk artist”, it’s not much good to spend your time raving about Girls Aloud.

Now, here’s the issue.

Most people, in most fields of consumption, most of the time are NOT maximisers at all. They are something completely different. They are satisficers (bit.ly/tEL7). What they are doing is not using insane amounts of mental energy to attempt to optimise every decision. They are instead simply trying to avoid making a decision that is actually bad or which might cause them to look or feel foolish. For those people, good enough generally is.

Most important of all, they are not using their brand choices to compete with their fellow man, or to draw distinctions between them and their peer group. They are using them to fit in. To conform, not to outdo. You go to the films your friends like, you read the books your friends like, you listen to the music your friends like. It’s safe, after all. And you drive the car your friends drive. Because what you are driven by is not the idea of choice optimisation, but (in behavioural terms) the much more powerful idea of risk aversion. By fitting in, you may not have the best musical taste in the world, or eat the best food, or drive the best car — but you won’t go far wrong either. And, when making a purchase, what most people want, most of the time, is not the best they can buy: they want something that’s very unlikely to be crap.

The difference between the best and the least likely to be shite seems a hairsplitting one. In fact they are almost opposites.

Yet marketers very rarely acknowledge this distinction when debating the role of the brand — and it pays little attention to the job of being assuredly not crap — even though I suggest it is by far the more valuable economic role that brands play: not to be a promise of ultimate superiority but a cast iron assurance of pretty dependable non-shitness. The Fina ad is one good example. Even better is that great CDP ad for Smirnoff: “why waste money on real lemons”, which I can’t find, or the Volkswagen promise of reliability. But overall this proposition of “loss avoidance” is rare — most ads seek to boast a lot more than they reassure. Yet when you are handing over £1,000 to buy that flat screen TV, how much of your brain is worried about whether it is the best TV you can buy for £1,000, versus the part of the brain thinking “I hope this TV isn’t a crock of shite?” I’d put the ratio at about 1:2.

Because we all work in the field, marketers and advertising people are by temperament maximisers when it comes to brands. They use the fine distinctions between them to delineate themselves and to highlight their individuality. Yet the vast bulk of the money in any market at any time is in the hands of satisficers. People who want to meld with a peer group, not to outdo it, and people who are more eager to avoid social embarrassment or regret-inducing purchase mistakes than they are to display dominance.

Regret is a huge emotion, and people will pay huge sums to avoid it. You just need to watch Deal or No Deal to see this.

And the avoidance of possible regret is a much bigger factor in brand selection than the pursuit of perfection.  It will kill people in advertising to acknowledge this, but Ford is a much better brand than Audi, and M&S is a much better clothes brand than whatever it is you young things are wearing nowadays.

Interestingly, although unfashionable, satisficers are generally happier than maximiers. As one Brummie Ford driver once told us in a focus group: “I’m dead middle of the road, me. I love it.”

The Wiki Man www.spectator.co.uk  — 05.06.2010

How many small cars would be sold if advertisements showed them being driven by pensioners?

A few years ago a leisure centre advertised: “Keep-fit classes for the over-60s.” Nobody turned up. To broaden the appeal, they advertised “Keep-fit classes for the over-50s.” The sessions sold out. Not one of those joining was under 65 years of age. How many 65-year-olds want to attend anything aimed at the over-60s? And how many small cars would be sold if advertisements showed them being driven by pensioners (the people who actually buy them) rather than elfin 27-year-olds in capri pants?

“User imagery” it’s called, and it is a more powerful force than any of us would like to admit. Not only in what it makes us do, but in what it stops us doing. That sense of “who I am not” means, for instance, that I can never go on a skiing holiday, even though I would probably enjoy it, because for some reason I hate the thought of being the kind of person who goes skiing. I cannot own a BMW for the same reason. And it’s the same herd-instinct-in-reverse that explains why many music-lovers cannot stomach going to the opera, why left-wing people cannot wear blazers, why middle-class people stopped smoking, why everyone stopped drinking sherry and why Liberal Democrats are more difficult to convert into Tory voters than Labour voters are; self-image being a more stubborn force than self-interest.

It was this question of self-image that was, until now, the reason I could never wholeheartedly buy into the cult of Apple. In truth, I loved the products — but found the behaviour of the brand’s adherents slightly creepy. Apple-lovers seemed to me a cult obsessed with their own otherness, with a superior sense of being different — a little like Liberal Democrats, funnily enough, or evangelical Christians. Even though in each case the product (£10,000 tax threshold/eternal life/touch-screen interface) was great, the user-base was kind of off-putting. My aversion to Apple was, I knew, irrational. However, with the success of the iPhone and iPad, I now have more serious concerns.

These are best expressed in an article by Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times. She believes the millions who are adopting Apple’s universe of applications in preference to using the open web are making the same choice people make when they leave a thriving yet messy city for a gated community in the suburbs: sacrificing freedom and variety for safety and neatness. The price — that Apple vets every app that is sold — is one Apple fans seem strangely content to pay. Were I to suggest Ian Paisley perform this vetting, they would be up in arms — they would hate the idea of moral discrimination — but aesthetic dictatorship by a Californian liberal is apparently fine.

There is a great irony here, of course — in that the greatest Apple lovers are found in Hoxton or Shoreditch, places they chose for their authenticity and grit. In fact, many almost certainly describe these areas as “vibrant” — a word which when applied to neighbourhoods means both “you can buy exotic fruit at the local market” and “hold on to your wallet.” These people would die rather than move to Milton Keynes. But technologically they are doing exactly that.

Totalitarianism has often worked hand in hand with design and aesthetics (the SS got their uniforms from Hugo Boss). So all the more reason to beware.

The Wiki Man www.campaignlive.co.uk  — 21.12.2007

Oh shit! My advertising works and I can’t explain why.

This week’s blog post is brought to you by the letters M, S and O, by the number two — and by the late Paul Feyerabend of UC Berkeley.

One of the strangest (and, to my mind, most unedifying) phenomena in advertising today is the sight of ad-folk performing hideous mental contortions in their attempt to accommodate some recent advertising which does not, strictly speaking, conform to their own definition of “good advertising.” M&S, O2, Dairy Milk.

The industry’s attempts to reconcile these campaigns with its prejudices is a little like golf’s adoption of Tiger Woods: “You don’t look like you belong here, but God do we need you on the team.”

But there is still discomfort. M&S, you see, “doesn’t really have an idea.” O2 is “kind of design-led.” Cadbury’s “doesn’t really have a clear-cut proposition.”

Just as Tiger Woods is the successor to Jesse Owens, these triumphant misfits are the successors to First Direct or Ronseal. Ads whose “unaccountable” success unsettled the industry. In other words, they are ads which don’t conform to adland’s rigidly-held view of what constitutes a good ad. As such they are seen as slightly unwelcome by the many ad fascists who believe that there is only one kind of great advertising and that moreover this great advertising can only be arrived at in one way.

Ad fascists react to successful exceptions rather as Hitler reacted to Jesse Owens. They don’t like them because they challenge their core beliefs. In this case it is the simplistic belief that advertising can be reduced to a few simple rules or “a single theory of everything.” A neat, all encompassing definition of “What is good and why.” These wholly artificial rules are rather attractive if we are to maintain the pretence that advertising is a neat and replicable science.

As it’s Christmas, I’ll make an attempt to enumerate a few of these rules now. You may like to add to them below…

No idea or campaign can be of any merit whatsoever unless it gives rise to award-winning ads (M&S’s work create a kind of creative nervousness here).

• On watching an ad, it must be possible for any junior planner to deconstruct it, deducing the original business problem in question and extracting from each execution the same single sentence proposition devised to address it.

• Advertising has no other function beyond the tortuously slow creation of brand-value through repetition of one message.

• Advertising only works in the long term. Indeed any communication that looks eager to obtain short or even medium-term results (perhaps by scandalously including a price or promotional offer) barely deserves the name of advertising.

• No great advertisement or brand should ever communicate more than one thing. Indeed every brand must be distillable to a single aphorism. Never be so foolish as to spend $2 billion designing a car which has good acceleration and good cornering (we don’t want to confuse anyone here now do we?). But, equally, every ad must always say *one* relevant thing — no gratuitous singing nuns, please. Even Levi’s ads found it necessary to cite one product feature.

Now, just for a moment, I want you to consider something shocking — frightful. And it’s this.

• Maybe attaching your brand name to some singing nuns would work perfectly well. It wouldn’t make any sense, but then neither does Christianity or Harry Potter, neither of which seem to suffer inordinately from the fact. Ordinary people do not demand rigorous sequential logic from their friends; do they want it from their brands? No Japanese advertising makes any sense at all. Logic is a client requirement, that’s all.

• There are many ways of arriving at good advertising, some of them involving sequential logic, others not. Advertising can work its magic in many ways. And can do more than one thing for a brand at the same time.

• These different roles of advertising may be complementary but they may also be incommensurable, eg. it may be possible to have a good brand idea and a good idea about promotion without the two being connected. The belief that there is only one means by which an advertising agency can add value to a client or a brand is massively limiting to the value an agency can add to its clients.

• By submitting to advertising purists, we may be sacrificing a great deal of brand voltage on the altar of brand purity. Yet it seems to be that noisy brands are the more commercially successful.

• That, in an attempt to appear purist and scientific, we are actually being very bad scientists. Our obsession with one true, purebred Aryan form of advertising is a massive brake on progress and invention.

And that’s what brings me to Mr Feyerabend - former disciple of Karl Popper and self-described “epistemological anarchist”; the author of many books, including Against Method. A little outdated now, but he’s still considered the century’s leading philosopher of science.

Now, if I understand this rightly, what Feyerabend said was that the insistence on a single approach to scientific discovery is actually unscientific.

Put another way, if you had retroactively applied the rules of scientific rationalism to all of the major scientific discoveries of the past 500 years you would have invalidated most of them. Perhaps most (penicillin, the X-Ray, the microwave, Aspirin, radio, Archimedes in the bath)  were the product of “inspired opportunism”. As he once put it: “a methodology was an ideology Galileo could not afford.”

“To support his position that methodological rules generally do not contribute to scientific success, Feyerabend provides counterexamples to the claim that (good) science operates according to a certain fixed method. He took some examples of episodes in science that are generally regarded as indisputable instances of progress and showed that all common prescriptive rules of science are violated in such circumstances. Moreover, he claimed that applying such rules in these historical situations would actually have prevented scientific revolution.”

When I recently talked to Paul Smith here about advertising in the late 1970s, he remarked that the great virtue of the time was that no one demanded the same tedious logic be applied to every message. Hofmeister had a bear on the logo — that was enough. Hovis wasn’t even northern — but let’s pretend it is…. Hamlet had a message which was surely generic to all tobacco — indeed which was truer of cigarettes than cigars (cigars are rarely consumed at moments of stress).

And so on….

Freed from the wearisome burden of self-imposed rationality, and by the tyranny of consistency, there’s no limit to what we might do.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting we ignore come basic precepts. But brands, like fugues, can carry more than one tune. And even the occasional discord can sound better than a monotone.

In other words, get me some nuns.

The Wiki Man www.spectator.co.uk — 24.04.2008

It isn’t a framework, it’s a prison.

The recent Cadbury’s campaign is (not unreasonably) considered one of the most radical pieces of advertising to be seen in Britain for a few years. Without belittling the achievement in any way, this is a terrible reflection on how same-ish most other TV advertising has become.

Like many other landmark advertising moments, the brilliance of the Cadbury’s approach lies in what it leaves out.

Imagine, at the end of the ad, if the gorilla had paused to enjoy some chocolate, or a pour-shot had interrupted the build-up; suppose a cheesy voice-over had forcibly supplied the logic with “there’s almost nothing that can beat the joy of Cadbury’s milk chocolate.” You then would have been left with a pretty average, if still watchable, ad. Nothing more.

Like a few other significant landmarks (B&H, say, First Direct, or the brilliant but under appreciated Lucky Star advertisement for Mercedes from CDD — which, through the failure of juries to recognise it, has forever dented my faith in advertising awards) the communication works because it does not hand hold the viewer down every step of the logical path.

The convention of TV ads (one exacerbated by pre-testing) holds that at the end of the 30s anyone of even limited understanding must be able to parrot a one-sentence explanation of its single and unambiguous meaning.

The assumption is that Joe public likes his messaging pretty direct. It’s reminiscent of a passage in Saki’s Reginald in Russia:

“Both Egbert and Lady Anne would have preferred something from The Yeoman of the Guard, which was their favourite opera. In matters artistic they had a similarity of taste. They leaned toward the honest and explicit in art, a picture, for instance, that told its own story, with generous assistance from its title. A riderless warhorse with harness in obvious disarray, staggering into a courtyard full of pale swooning women, and the marginally noted ‘Bad News’ suggested to their minds a distinct interpretation of some military catastrophe. They could see what it was meant to convey, and explain it to friends of duller intelligence.”

To those unfamiliar with the Munro oeuvre, I should explain Saki here is not being kind. (He is very rarely, if ever, kind.)

Now if we assume that all target audiences are like Egbert and Lady Anne, and require an explicit nudge (geddit?) so as to be told what to think, that may be fine, if slightly patronising. But then what is to explain the millions successfully spent on non-explicit forms of communication? Design, for instance? Or sponsorship? Noone feels that an elegantly redesigned new pack needs a sentence of justification. Or that an Olympic sponsorship needs a line of explanation. What would it be in any case?  In Japan, which spends a higher proportion of GDP on advertising than almost anywhere, they have a remarkably non-explicit approach to advertising — the Cadbury’s approach there would not have been considered especially mould-breaking.

Why do we apply certain standards to good communication in one medium which we believe don’t matter in another? And where is the justification for this framework which has become the standard straitjacket approach to TV? Moreover, has it occurred to anyone that it is the oblique and enigmatic which often works best. Indeed the value and sincerity of a message is often destroyed by the revelation of self-interest.

Think of a message as a kind of present. Those presents which mean most are those which have no whiff of the self-serving. Which is why, for the chaps among you, your wife will be more delighted to receive a diamond necklace than a Hoover this Christmas — or, worse still, lingerie.

The Wiki Man www.spectator.co.uk — 23.08.2008

People will make better choices when their decisions have rapidly visible results.

Most ceilings are painted white. This means that, when repainting a ceiling, you put white paint on an already white surface, making it hard to see where you’ve been. Glancing up admiringly the next day, you then find you’ve just missed that bit by the corner. At least that’s what happened until a year ago when an inspired scientist invented a paint that was white when dry but pink when wet. Suddenly you could see at a glance a spot that you’d missed.

In their now famous book Nudge, self-described “paternalistic libertarians” Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein cite this new paint as an example of “feedback” — the notion that people will make better choices when their decisions have rapidly visible results. If you’ve tried typing on an outdated PC, where characters take seconds to appear on screen, you know how disconcerting slow feedback can be. But it can be a matter of life or death: Vehicle Activated Signs (the ones which flash up your speed) have been shown to prevent more accidents than speed cameras; at 5% cent of the cost. Instant feedback may improve behaviour more than delayed punishment.

Two other concepts introduced by Thaler and Sunstein are “defaults” and “choice architecture”. The first highlights the importance of setting the right default in certain decisions (some people believe consent to organ donation should be considered a given unless the deceased is carrying a “non-donor card”). “Choice architecture” concerns how we present people with a sensible range of options — not so few that they cannot choose well, but not so many that they are blinded by choice. (Give me a choice of five pension plans and I’ll probably join one; give me a choice of 90 and I’ll probably join none.)

Amazingly there is a single item in your home which defies all three of these Nudge principles. It is the DVD player — a hateful example of bad design.

1. Feedback. Every input to a DVD player has no observable effect for four seconds. Simply ejecting a disk means pressing “eject” then making a cup of tea while you wait for the machine to wrestle with its inner demons. “Hal, open the disk bay door!”, “I’m sorry Dave, I can’t allow you to do that.”

2. Choice architecture. The standard DVD remote control is covered by 37 buttons all of an equally fiddly size, 32 of which perform no useful function whatsoever.

3. Defaults. When I load a disk, it’s because I want to watch the film. From the start. In bloody English. The remote is by now somewhere under the sofa, so the last thing I need is a menu screen asking whether to “a.) play the main feature? or b.) watch 17 minutes of unreleased footage with a spoken commentary and Flemish subtitles?” Default to a.), damn it!

While we’re at it, kill that advertisement at the beginning of every DVD which suggests that piracy is no different from car theft. First, this admonition only appears on legal DVDs, so the target audience won’t see it. Second, it’s insane to claim piracy is equivalent to physical crime. “You wouldn’t desecrate a cemetery”, it suggests, “and you wouldn’t burgle a pensioner’s flat while smearing excrement over the walls. So what makes you think Cameron Diaz doesn’t deserve a bigger yacht?”

The Wiki Man www.spectator.co.uk — 19.04.2008

If there is one country to which you should always carry a laptop, it’s France.

My article last week (“Mad Men are taking over the world”) led me to be accused of elitism by one of the magazine’s online readers. What riled him was my suggestion that, rather than spending £6 billion on speeding up the Eurostar journey by an hour, it might have been better to spend a few million quid providing Wi-Fi to the passengers, allowing them to make better use of their time on the train. I was told that this was typical of the “businessman’s arrogant assumption that only business passengers mattered” — and what about people who wanted to go to Paris for leisure?

In reply I said this chap seemed a pretty rum kind of populist if he thought it reasonable to make the 45 million people in Britain who never want to go to Paris pay £100 each — ie almost the cost of a year’s upgrade to Sky Sports — just so Mr Egalitarian here could get to the Musée d’Orsay at 11am rather than noon. I also thought it odd to assume that Wi-Fi is only of benefit to business people. In truth I am more likely to take a laptop with me on holiday than on business. And if there is one country to which you should always carry a laptop, it’s France.

Broadband speeds in France are spectacular. Every public space or café will offer “le wee-fee” to its patrons. Amazon.fr has a huge range of English books which they will deliver next day to my bourgeois luxury hotel — or indeed to my accuser’s modest backstreet pension. Moreover, there are many sources of leisure information you can only ever find online: ticket-booking, train times, maps, phone numbers — or the fact that the Musée d’Orsay is closed owing to a wild-cat strike by curatorial staff so it doesn’t matter what time of day you get there anyway, comrade.

Like my accuser, I love going to France. He may like the deep-felt love of justice, whereas I like their admirable policy of pricing the poor off the motorways. But the best thing nowadays is the French love of technology and innovation. Fnac, for example, makes our own electrical retailers look second-rate.

On a recent French rail trip, I walked most of the length of the train and found over half of the people onboard were using laptops (I even made an unwelcome foray into second class, and it was the same story among the proletariat). What the French have found is that any journey over two hours is transformed by a laptop. It is better than any in-flight entertainment. You can play games, listen to over 4,000 hours of Johnny Hallyday, watch DVDs, read emails, blog, entertain children, organise photographs — or even oppress the lower orders with a little light capitalism.

The invention of the laptop and BlackBerry have revived the case for rail travel for, unlike a car trip, time spent by train can be put to good use. In France they know this. Meanwhile, in the UK, a bunch of idiots with engineering degrees are busy removing the tables from our trains to fit in 4.9% more passengers per carriage — unaware that by removing the table they are destroying the single most compelling reason to travel by rail. Besides, if it’s elitist to prefer your coffee on a table to on the floor, then guilty as charged.

The Wiki Man www.campaignlive.co.uk — 11.11.2008

A scientific approach to queueing — just what I’ve been waiting for.

Like the late Alan Clarke, who “would not queue for anything under any circumstances” I am driven practically insane by the time wasting procedures of many service industries. For example the check-in procedure at hotels regularly induces a kind of Tourette’s: “You’ve known I was coming for two weeks — why couldn’t you have my twatting key ready, you c***s!“*

If hotels are bad, car rental firms are worse. Two weeks before my arrival I have dutifully logged on and, in my own time, typed in to the rental company’s database every conceivable detail about myself. My driving licence number, my address, three telephone numbers, the address where we shall be staying, my credit card number and the number of my incoming flight… So why in God’s name does the person at the rentals desk need to spend six minutes incessantly tapping on a keyboard for before handing over the keys? Are they secretly writing a novel while pretending to work at an airport car-hire desk? Maybe a novel drawing heavily on their real life experiences and featuring an angry fat man from England who swears a lot?

Now, at the moment, I am probably unusual in this impatience. But — and here’s something every service industry needs to know — my annoyance will become less and less rare in the next ten years. Why? Because one massive effect the internet has had on all of us, but disproportionately more on the younger amongst us, is that our expectations of immediacy and speed of response have been transformed.

When you are accustomed to living life at an online pace, you live in a world where every action results in an immediate response. Click on the link and, after just a few seconds, up comes the page. Hence when you order a coffee and 10 minutes later it hasn’t arrived, your first response is no longer. “Gosh, they must be quite busy!” No, your autonomic response is that “Something must have gone wrong” — or, if you’re me, it’s: “They’ve f***ing cocked it up completely, the incompetent, c***ing bastards!”

Recently we at Ogilvy had an HR presentation on the foibles and peculiarities of Generation Y. This impatience, this expectation of instantaneous reaction is high among them. When they send an email, for instance, or text a client, they are reduced to complete befuddlement if they do not get an answer within 20 minutes — or at most an hour. They start emailing and texting incessantly. To older clients, this is unbelievably annoying. To the young, this is normal behaviour.

In the words of one 20-year-old: “The trouble with McDonald’s is it’s too bloody slow.”

In a few years time, young people may expect to text their burger order when they’re 10 minutes away.

Now, if you are any kind of service industry, you need to be preparing for this insane new expectation of speed. To do so, what you need to understand is that not all waits are equal. In fact it is possible to transform a customer’s perception of speed by some clever behavioural psychology.

The expert on this is a splendid man called David Maister, and his basic principles of queueing are to be found here: (bit.ly/3CAVqS)

There are a few splendid principles. For instance, if you let people at least make a start on the process, they mind waiting less. If Starbucks let me place your order when you walked in — ie at the back of the queue — I wouldn’t mind waiting for my coffee nearly so much — what I find really annoying is waiting to tell them what I want.

A second principle: people dislike waiting much more when the length of the delay is uncertain. Tell them an expected wait time and (as the London underground discovered) people are much less paranoid about any delay.

Another great book to read on this subject is Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt. He adds some superb insights into the psychology of traffic jams and why they are so frustrating.

These are both worth reading, especially in a recession. After all, by streamlining service, it’s possible to reduce the cost of your service dramatically without reducing the price at all.

*The Beverly Wilshire Hotel has a system where the driver of your Lincoln Towncar furtively texts ahead to the hotel to announce your impending arrival. This meant that, even though I had never been there before in my life, the staff opened my car door for me with the words: “Welcome to the Beverly Wilshire, Mr Sutherland.” This was so cool I nearly soiled myself with the excitement.

The Wiki Man www.spectator.co.uk — 09.05.2009

I have just passed a pub in gosport.

“Beer garden with free gas barbecue”, reads a notice outside. “Bring your own food.”

Perhaps the landlord has just been reading an advance copy of Chris Anderson’s upcoming book Free, subtitled Why $0.00 is the future of business. This book (an expanded version of a Wired article at tinyurl.com/2okqbk) suggests a new business model has arisen where companies, rock bands and publishers give things away at no charge in order to make money somewhere else.

In truth there is nothing new about this — since Hogarth’s time pubs have experimented with cross-subsidies, offering free straw or, latterly, peanuts to attract customers or make them thirsty. Anderson mentions King Gillette, who a century ago gave away handles for his razors in order to make money selling the blades. Free handsets for mobile phones are a modern equivalent.

It’s a practice partly driven by quirks of human psychology, in that people are remarkably eccentric about what they are prepared to pay for (beer) and what they are not (gas for the barbecue). And it’s especially common online since, when paying for online media, people are even crankier than usual. Offer anyone a current copy of the Sunday Times and they hand over £2 without demur (£3 at WHSmith’s, when it will then come with a chocolate bar the size of the flight deck of the USS Nimitz). Suggest they pay £10 a year for access to a searchable online database of every article to have appeared in the Times since 1785, on the other hand, and they react as though you’re deranged. Perversely the very abundance of content available online diminishes what people are prepared to pay for it.

The “free” model falls down when — to extend the pub metaphor — people turn up to use your gas barbecue and bring their own drink. Or when a rival opens an off-licence at the bottom of your beer garden selling beer at a discount. This sounds absurd — and in the real world it would be. In the digital world it happens all the time: the money is made in one place while the costs fall somewhere else altogether.

So when broadcasters allow internet users to download films or watch high-definition television programmes online, they pocket the revenue while the costs of providing the extra bandwidth fall to your internet provider. Is this fair? Equally, is it right that Google make money by directing people to a web page while the people who wrote the page earn nothing?

Much of this misdirection of money has arisen because of a widely held assumption that people won’t pay for content online. And yet, as Apple’s iTunes music store shows, if you make it easy enough, it isn’t impossible to get people to pay smallish sums quite readily. Although some online newspapers tried charging for their content and then abandoned the attempt after readers fled, it isn’t clear whether their readers were rejecting the practice because of the cost or because of the hassle involved. It’s time people gave the idea of micro-payments a second try. After all, if Susan Boyle had earned only a fraction of a penny from each of her 75 million views on YouTube, she would have enough to keep her cat Pebbles on hand-reared organic mice for life.

The Wiki Man www.campaignlive.co.uk — 20.01.2008

The Nintendo Wife-O-Meter.

The film you will see when you click here (bit.ly/qD0DVa) shows Shigeru Miyamoto, the eminence grise behind the Nintendo Wii. This extraordinary man (he is predominantly a game designer, not a marketer) describes the thinking behind the creation of the Wii— an incredibly brave decision which involved (in BBH parlance) making a massive zag where XBox and Sony had both zigged.

His thinking ran as follows.

1. In Darwinian terms, if all three gaming platforms adopt the same strategy — that of pursuing ever greater graphical realism through increased processor power — it essentially creates an insane arms race between the three contenders. This in turn will lead to an absurd market eco-system — rather like a prehistoric world only inhabited by three large, carnivorous dinosaurs with nothing to eat but each other … and no mammals or other life forms of any kind. Platforms would become increasingly expensive, indeed prohibitively so for all but the most committed gamers.

2. In any case, Miyamoto felt the other two platforms were too fixated by the opinions of hardcore gamers and their preoccupation with power and graphics; in obsessing over this core market, they had overlooked the potential to grow the overall market for games via people who actually had jobs, children, lives, etc. The kind of people who would occasionally break from gaming to visit the lavatory.

Through this he came up with the wife-o-meter — measuring each aspect of the Wii against the simple question: how much more likely would this be to encourage my wife to become a gamer? (To defuse the cries of sexism, I should point out that Mrs Miyamoto is not a doormat, she is formerly a senior executive with Nintendo: it just happened that she was hitherto not into gaming; wife-o-meter is furthermore an inexact translation from the Japanese.)

In other words Miyamoto adopted a very simple approach to innovation: let’s not obsess about enthusing an existing market — instead, let’s create a new one. It’s a simple approach. One which says: “To hell with your core target audience — you can usually afford to take them for granted anyway — and instead let’s use innovation to look for business elsewhere.”

It’s an approach that has worked for brands as diverse as The Labour Party, Apple and Nike. And it’s worked accidentally for hundreds more brands.

Apple? Surely not? Absolutely. It was called the iPod. Try this, if you don’t believe me: go back to the day the iPod was launched and visit the Mac online forums. The Mac fanatics hated this thing. “Just what the world needs, another music player,” sneers one. “Steve has really lost it this time,” whinges another. More heinous still, remember, iTunes even ran on a PC. This was, in a way, Jobs’ clause 4 moment.

The same applies to Nike. The brilliant Michael Tchao, GM of Nike’s Techlab Group, came up against resistance from hardcore runners at the very idea of Nike+. Several even claimed that “If you listen to music, you’re not a proper runner.” Yet, as many times before, Nike has deliberately courted audiences which are miles away from their “core target audience” — the old, for instance.

On many more occasions, innovation has reached new and unintended audiences entirely by accident. I don’t believe that easyJet’s passenger base would be anything like as upmarket as it is had the internet not been invented. Booking low cost travel online is a wholly different experience — and vastly less demeaning — than using the phone. Yet even the farsighted Stelios resisted using the web for several years, claiming it was just for geeks.

Likewise the internet has taken the whole mail order proposition dramatically upmarket too. Nothing to do with conventional positioning — simply the emotional effect of using one channel rather than another.

Argos would be another example. Men traditionally are supposed to hate shopping. And yet Argos amazingly has as many male shoppers as female. Why? Because Argos uniquely offers offline shopping in a format that does not alienate men.

Why has no other retail brand attempted this? Why do my M&S corduroy trousers not simply contain a URL and a reference number if I wish to reorder them? Or allow me to order a second pair by text? I’ll happily give you my money — just don’t make me spend two hours in a bloody shop — probably in a queue behind someone from WACL wondering whether something is also available in a 12.

The fact is that innovation in the form of delivery, or in some other technology, can massively change the audience your brand or product appeals to. And so the idea of innovating with a core audience in mind may be a dreadful mistake: as if Tony Blair had decided to reinvent the Labour Party by first consulting the mining unions.

One of our clients was a train company. Every time they performed research, they eliminated all rail rejectors. I always thought these were the very people we should have been talking to.

The Post Office is perhaps the most guilty organisation in terms of focusing on one target audience to the exclusion of anyone else. “The People’s Post Office” it calls itself, in a line reminiscent of Mao’s China. Yet the people it has in mind don’t seem to include people with a job, people with a car, people under 60, people with footwear not lined with sheepskin. For God’s sake, I am delighted to see lots of Post Offices serving the community, but could you just make 5% of outlets cater to people for whom time has a value. Maybe you could create special premium post offices for fat Welsh wankers in Jags where a first class stamp costs £1.50. I’ll happily pay it. It can be a drive-thru window, if you like. Just give me somewhere which stays open after 11am on Saturdays.

Please, for a second, just try ignoring your “core target audience.”

The Wiki Man www.campaignlive.co.uk — 01.07.2007

The Facebook thing — allow me to explain.

It is time for me to acknowledge what anomalous Welsh papist Mark Earls has been telling us all along: we really are a herd species. (Humans, I mean, not just the Welsh.) And I finally came to this conclusion when I found myself checking Facebook or Twitter every morning before I turned to a newspaper or opened up my email. Why would I do this?

In other words, why is it more compelling to know that one of my friends is buying a latte than to read news of genuine importance? I think Mark provides most of the explanation in his recent and excellent Twitter article in Market Leader … But there is one more thing I would like to add.

In Market Leader Mark describes much of the anthropology that lies behind social media. That people, quite simply, like contact with other people. And that interpersonal communication does not exist simply for the transmission of information but as a form of bonding activity.

Indeed I was very taken recently to hear of a practice that has arisen in Africa. In that continent, many of the mobile operators allow users (they are rarely subscribers) to send anyone unlimited free SMS reading simply “Call me” — the reason being that at any one time many people have no available call time left on their PAYG accounts. Every day millions of people take advantage of this, even when they have no wish to hear from anyone else: the sending of “Call me” has come to mean “I care”, “I love you” or “I am thinking of you”; a kind of digital “Ça Va?” And if you actually want the person to call you send the message twice.

It’s a super illustration of the value of a kind of communication that is as high in value as it is low in bandwidth. The very kind of communication which has been most persistently undervalued and misunderstood.

While people have waxed on endlessly about the possibility of video on mobile*, rich media 3G networks, WAP and video over broadband, most of the real successes have been those minimal, short forms of interpersonal communication (such as SMS) where a.) the effort required is small and b.) the level of self-importance exhibited by the sender is relatively low. Forms of communication whose analogue equivalents are far closer to the saucy seaside postcard than the two-page A4 letter on headed paper.

Why are these forms so popular? Simply because people like Dolly Messitering — sharing myriad (often unimportant) facts about their lives with others. But they are inhibited from doing so when the effort is high (a phone call demands five minutes of pleasantries which an SMS does not) or when the form of communication has too great an import or level of intrusion to justify the content (you can reasonably use the post to send a wedding invitation but not a minor item of news).

Facebook and Twitter add something altogether new to the individual’s communications palette — in that they are the first ever forms of digital communication to be semi-addressable. What I mean by semi-addressable is that they generally confine your outpourings to a community of friends — but the message is not addressed to specifically named individuals.

As a result of this, they enable communication to take place at a gloriously trivial** level. If I were to email you daily with news of my plans for the day, or to tell you of a vague intention to take my kids camping, you would think me an astoundingly self important person (if you don’t already) or perhaps insane; had I any sensitivity at all I would also feel that the addressing of the email to you imposes on you an obligation to read it out of all proportion to the importance of the contents. If I tweet or Facebook the same information indiscriminately to my friends, it is on the shared understanding that noone need read or act on the information at all — indeed it may not be aimed at them at all, but some other friends on my list.

That, in short, is the value of the semi-addressable medium. They are the natural home for peripheral or tangential information. The birdsong of social intercourse. Analogous in many ways to the noticeboards we used to have in agencies before email seemed to kill them. Except these boards are visible worldwide.

So far, fine. But why does this matter to brands? Actually for a very good reason.

Quite simply because, contrary to what you may have heard from the odd agency claiming that “your brand belongs at the centre of consumers’ lives” this simply isn’t true.

At the centre of people’s lives belong their families, their homes, their communities, their religions and their closest friends. Brands — with very few exceptions — have a natural place either at the periphery of people’s lives or occupying the network spaces — the interstices — between people.

I truly wonder whether these social media, as natural homes for matters of peripheral importance, and for incidental information — aren’t a more natural home for brands than radio or TV.

After all, perhaps the greatest value of many brands is as low bandwidth, highly compressed form of telegraphing to our friends the more trivial aspects of who we are. For this, social media seems perfect.

And what of brands which actually enable us to project ourselves to our network of friends? I have just suggested to American Express that they issue a card which posts your every purchase (the location, though not necessarily the amount) to Facebook. I think they believe I am mad — but I’ll keep trying.

*Mobile TV was described by one pundit as “like sex out of doors — often desirable but rarely practicable.”

**Trivia actually derives from the Latin word for “crossroads” — the place where most minor gossip and twittering took place in the ancient world.

The Wiki Man www.campaignlive.co.uk — 22.08.2007

Does something that survives for 18 months deserve to be called a strategy.

Or should you fire most of your planners and replace them with jingle writers?

I am old enough (just) to remember when televisions showed a small glowing dot after they were switched off and when radio dials carried strange words like “Hilversum”; I can remember when (though not why)something called 3-2-1 attracted a weekly audience of 17million; I can even remember an interesting historical curiosity called “a long-running advertising campaign.”

How many of these rarities still survive in the UK? I can think of about 10: Stella Artois, Yellow Pages, The Economist, Andrex, BT, interestingly. Erm…maybe not as many as 10.

In fact so rare has the campaign become in advertising circles that the very title of our trade magazine is actually an overclaim. It should be renamed: “short-term tactical fix.”

This is a terrible state of affairs. The benefits of owning a brand are entirely connected to longevity — something which is true even of “new” brands such as Google. A brand provides an organisation with its heritable characteristics, with a trust that survives beyond an individual transaction. That trust hangs on consistency.

It is also through consistency that brands become truly eloquent, by a kind of power of distillation — rather as, when you are in a long-term relationship, you can leave a great deal unsaid. This brand shorthand (Steve Hayden describes a brand as the most effective form of data compression in existence) should give long lived brands a considerable advantage over competitors. Twenty years ago it did.

What has gone wrong? I can think of a few things. Too much pointless activity born of sobriety and earnestness, as I mentioned last week, may be part of it. The Americanisation of organisations does not help, either (Americans are fantastically industrious people, but seem to be fantastically industrious whether there is a point to the activity or not — which may explain why so many great luxury brands are managed by the lazy French on 35 hours a week).

But there is a bigger reason, I suspect, and it goes by the word “strategy”. The conventional idea seems to be that advertising strategy defers to brand strategy which in turn serves the business strategy. This is probably a sensible way for things to work in a family owned business where the management may actually be around for a decade or so, and where the firm’s whole purpose isn’t reinvented every couple of years to suit the whims and fashions of a few 28-year-old city analysts. It may also work in a company fortunate enough to be bought by private equity, which can unfold its plans over years, rather than having to explain itself one quarter at a time.

But now when, in publicly-held organisations, strategy has become volatile, a new question needs to be asked: is business strategy no longer stable enough to drive a successful advertising strategy?

In other words, is strategy now so hopelessly mutable that hanging your brand on a strategy is like tying your dog to a parked car (something that works for as long as the car remains stationary, but with terrible consequences once it moves off)? Even in an organisation with an unwavering business purpose, an advertising strategy will rarely stay constant: after all, in marketing, the definition of “strategy” is “that thing which an incoming marketing director seeks to change or reinvent — usually biannually.”

So, grand as it is as a word, is a strategy a hopeless thing to which to hitch advertising. When even magnificent strategies manifested in such lines as “The Fourth Emergency Service”, “You’re amazing, we want you to stay that way”, “Have a break, have a KitKat”, “Membership has its privileges”, seem to be killed off with barely a thought, what hope is there for yours?

I remember a wonderful thought for Morethan surfaced a couple of years ago. “What a wonderful strategy,” I thought, and it was for the two months it lasted.

So, should we abandon all this fine long-term planning as a hopelessly idealistic lost cause and just say that ad campaigns would be better off hitching their futures to “minor” executional details which are (ironically) far harder to kill than a strategy…

The Andrex Puppy, Silk Cut, The Yellow Pages bloke, The BT Bloke, Cillit Bang, The Sheilas’ Wheels tune? The Dulux dog?

Imagine this: you are going into a meeting at Dulux to announce your new advertising strategy. Will anyone ask you a hard question about what was wrong with the old one? Probably not. Announce you are killing off the dog, and you’ll face a fight. Next try suggesting the Economist should abandon red, and Sheilas’ Wheels should try plainsong. See the point?

So a suggestion: sack half your planners and replace them with jingle writers. It’s not that planning was wrong (it was a noble ideal for sure) it just didn’t work. It simply produced a wine that required laying down for people who were planning to hold a party that night.

Here’s plan b: keep your planning function, but don’t attach your advertising to a conventional strategy but to a higher purpose. What we at Ogilvy call a “big ideal”. Dirt is Good. Campaign for Real Beauty. Just Do It.

You see the great thing about ideals is that they are difficult to walk away from. Embarrassing, even. Yet they can accommodate an immense amount of change and variation. But only up to a point.

The next Dove client of ours might change the packaging. They may develop a new product range. They could change their underlying strategy. But if they were to suggest using six-foot Ukrainian blondes in all the advertising we’d say: “Oi, Dove Client, No!”

And this time we might actually win.

The Wiki Man www.spectator.co.uk — 14.06.2008

Once you pass 40, you need to try harder to like things you instinctively hate.

A 1980s cartoon from Private Eye shows a teenage boy, dressed in animal skins, staring intently into the dancing flames of a small fire. Behind him, bearded and leaning on a club, stands his scowling Neanderthal father, horrified: “When I was a boy we had to make our own entertainment.”

The great Douglas Adams believed technology always arouses one of three different reactions in us, depending on our age at the time it first appeared. So anything invented before our tenth birthday leaves us unfazed — it’s mere infrastructure (just as my daughters are no more excited by Sky+ than I am by plumbing). By contrast the stuff invented in the 30 years after our 10th birthday, well that’s real technology, and an endless source of awe and fascination (the way we still enjoy a minor thrill each time we go abroad and find our mobile still works). Last are the things invented after we hit 40. These we greet with blimpish disapproval: “absurd, over-complicated nonsense… what’s wrong with carbon paper anyway?” (Pretty much my father’s view of computers, until he found you could use them to sell second-hand books.)

As with music, so with gadgets: once you pass 40, as your natural inquisitiveness flags, you need to try harder to like things you instinctively hate.

There are good reasons for this. For a start, the cost of adopting new technology is usually heavily front-end loaded, many innovations delivering long-term gains at the price of short-term annoyance. Take online grocery shopping. The first time you place an order, the process of filling your basket is tedious; worse even than a real trip to Tesco. By your fourth visit, the website has recognised your favourite items, and you find that typing “marjoram” is easier than finding it in a crowded shop, even supposing you knew what it looked like anyway. By your tenth visit you can do an entire week’s shopping in four minutes. In the departures lounge at JFK. At 3am.

Just as you can’t discover your favourite music by reading sleeve notes, you can’t judge these things without trying them. No one tells you that online grocery shopping saves you from flying home to an empty fridge. You just find out for yourself.

This is because, with use, most technology pays back in unenvisaged ways. Satellite navigation is a good example. Older people sneer at SatNav, loving to remind us of “the time that Argos lorry got stuck down Jethro’s field”, yet, as these people were born in an era when the combined resources of the US and British air forces couldn’t find Berlin when it was cloudy, I can’t help feeling that they’re being a bit picky complaining when a £200 box from Curry’s fails to distinguish between a small path and a bridleway. In any case, they are missing the point. For the real value of satnav has little to do with navigation at all.

You see your TomTom will make mistakes, as human map readers do. That doesn’t matter. What does matter is that, when you do end up lost or in a ditch, you swear at a small electronic box and not at your wife. The device is really a marital aid — an electronic scapegoat. Even at a time of plummeting property prices, £200 to avoid a divorce is probably a good call.

The Wiki Man www.campaignlive.co.uk — 30.10.2007

When good marketers turn bad.

Isn’t it amazing! Just fancy! Who would ever have believed that things like Red Bull, SMS, Starbucks, Hotmail, Google, Amazon have all become billion dollar businesses despite not having any conventional marketing support? Of course we dare not face the more dreadful possibility — that it was the very absence of conventional marketing support which made them so successful.

We all know the phrase: that nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising. But can apparently good advertising also kill or wound a good product? Imagine for a moment it’s the late 1990s. The decision has been taken to enable inter-network SMS on all the major UK mobile networks. And a budget of £20 million or so has been put aside to promote the newfangled art of text messaging — hitherto the province only of a few geeks and weirdos (and me, incidentally).

What would the assumptions have been in the room? I can’t be sure, but I can safely bet that two of them would have been as follows: 1.) that this is a youth product, to be explicitly promoted to teenagers and 2.) that the product needed to be given a kind of USP to clarify the message — a single compelling reason why it’s a good idea. Happily, that never happened. Because if we fast-forward 10 years we shall see that 1.) text messaging is far more than a youth activity, being surprisingly infra-demographic and that 2.) even with hindsight, nobody even now can advance one single universal reason, logical or otherwise, why they like doing it. As St Augustine might have said: “Texto quia absurdum est.”

What a lucky escape for the mobile industry. Not only did they save themselves a few million pounds, but they also avoided the unseemly gaffe of strangling a new technology at birth.

Remember that any advertisement which depicted a bunch of teenagers of various ethnic origins excitedly texting (an aside: multiculturalism in advertising generally means you show people of widely different racial backgrounds yet all of exactly the same age) would have implicitly conveyed the message that texting was unsuitable for any other age group. And a single USP would have suggested that any other use of the technology was somehow slightly deviant.

We too often forget the power of advertising to alienate. When we are all “deluged” with communication, our first reaction is often to find a reason to reject it. To anyone over 40 these days, a good deal of advertising simply provides them with a licence to ignore it. We all accept that 25-year-old hoodies pay little attention to long-form ads for funeral plans on Sky channel 973; we may forget that the same happens in reverse: whenever we decide that young people are the only audience which matters, we lose the largest and richest swathe of the population. Too often we give thought to rifleshot targeting forgetting that (in non-discreet media, at least) this same rifleshot deafens the people it does not hit.

A few years ago, when my agency worked for Boots, we sent a mailing to male Advantage Card holders. Someone suggested we tested a minor change to the front cover montage by simply removing any photographs of mascara, lipstick or blusher and replacing them with non-feminine items. In truth, I was not much excited by this change as it seemed to me rather, um, cosmetic. In the event, the defeminised piece generated eight times more sales than the control. Note that nothing had been done to make the creative explicitly masculine (you didn’t get the chance to win an Iron John weekend in Nottingham or anything like that): all that was done was to remove anything that enabled a recipient to go: “obviously not for me.” It was a vital lesson that, in defining a target audience, there is a fine line between focus and tunnel vision. And that personalisation can be a negative act, how can I avoid making this person think me irrelevant may be as sensible an approach as trying to hold up a mirror to your audience.

In the event, with no excuse to reject it, people discovered their own various reasons for using SMS. For some people it saved money; for school kids it was a furtive way of messaging in class; for grandparents, interestingly, it became a non-embarrassing way to communicate with grandchildren. Today you can even used the medium to pay for car parking and the congestion charge. It is a triumph of universal adoption. And of not advertising too early.

I have made the point before that great brands are like great pubs. One of the requirements is that they cross a demographic divide. You might be quite a good pub if your only clientele is Fulham Estate agents who went to public school and failed their A-levels (in fact you’d be called the Pitcher & Piano) but you can’t ever be great. To be great you need a few rich folks and a few poor folks; a few oldies and some young people.

Nike’s extension of their brand belief to all sexes and ages is not a cop-out. It is proof of the brand’s greatness. As Andy Warhol said of Coca Cola: “The great thing about Coke is that the president of the US drinks the same Coke as the bum on the street.”

Those other brands I mentioned have prospered because people have been allowed to often discover them for themselves, without being told too explicitly who and what they are for: “If you don’t mind, I’ll discover my own USP.” The street finds its own uses for things, as someone once said. And isn’t it interesting how many successful brands eschew user imagery. easyJet works hard to deposition itself — to be socially neutral. Apple uses dead people or silhouettes. BMW for years had a rule that no people could be shown in its ads (an especially wise move as not even BMW drivers like other BMW drivers — or anyone else for that matter; note to BMW … don’t try starting a social network).

Is Red Bull an energy drink or a mixer? What is the user-imagery of Amazon? Who is the typical Google user? What makes Google better? The fact that we cannot answer these questions simply would typically be considered a flaw. We should come out with trite definitions: “She’s young, fashionable, contemporary — she moves with the times … ” Actually the fact that we cannot sum up the brand in an aphorism is something of a success.

Isn’t this a little odd coming from a direct marketer? Not at all — I am a massive advocate of more refined targeting of messages, and of discreet media used to tell complementary brand stories. The problem arises when the creative work is more targeted than the media it appears in, because then you are forcing the majority of your audience to view your brand from behind a velvet rope.

The Wiki Man www.campaignlive.co.uk — 22.06.2009

200 years after his birth, will marketers discover Darwin?

The great Drayton Bird once related a rather damning criticism of advertising once made by a client of his. “You advertising people … you go very deeply into the surface of things, don’t you?”

It is of course true. Yet half of me feels no need to apologise for this bias. The importance of the superficial is hugely underrated. As Matthew Taylor remarked last week at the IPA’s 44 Club, we can talk about quantitative easing as much as we like, but Gordon Brown’s electoral fate has been sealed not by his macroeconomic policy decisions but by a tendency to display bizarrely demented face movements which appear like some early failed attempt at Supermarionation (bit.ly/bBakwF).

Yet there is one form of shallowness in our business that does pain me. The fact that, as I remarked in my IPA inaugural speech, our models of human behaviour and persuasion are so pathetically shallow and make no attempt to place our discipline within any evidence-based scientific framework. “Rather like astrologers,”I said, quoting my colleague Alasdair Graham: “we use a language which is convincing to fellow converts but sounds suspiciously like bollocks to anyone else.”

Or, as I wish I had said: “Marketers still use simplistic models of human nature that remain uninformed by the past twenty years of research into human nature — research by evolutionary anthropologists, evolutionary biologists and evolutionary psychologists … as a result, they don’t have access to a good map of the human mind, or of the brave new semiotic world in which it dwells. What marketers need is Darwin.”

The reason I did not quote this sentence — along with many others by its author — is simply that they had not been published when I made the speech. This needle-sharp assessment (though I would add behavioural economists and information economists to his list) comes from Spent by Geoffrey Miller, a Darwinian Professor of Behavioural Psychology who has decided to investigate (with a healthy mixture of fascination and horror) the deeper origins of consumerism. (amzn.to/Yd4ay)

Alongside Steve Harrison’s, this in the one book on marketing and advertising you should read this year. (In fact it is interesting that Steve Harrison’s book also includes a plea for better human insight and cites both Alex Bogusky and Bill Bernbach in their preference for anthropologists over trend-spotters and other surface-skaters).

Now, in our defence (and Miller acknowledges this), it is only in the last few years that economists and psychologists have been prepared to speak to marketers. For years, the right wing within academia (often economists) didn’t like to acknowledge us because we disturbed their neo-classical model and the idea of the perfectly rational agents who operated within it; so much so, that The Economist for years employed an advertising correspondent who seemed to despise advertising. On the other hand, the Left (usually social scientists) didn’t like us because they thought we manipulated people into buying Hummers. It is only in recent years that a few people outside marketing have been prepared to overcome their initial distaste to discover that our job is an area worthy of study.

But in my view it is vital that we extend a hand of welcome to these people. Not least because we have quite a lot to contribute, as well as even more to learn. But also because it will be impossible for us to preach the value of marketing beyond the choir if we continue to speak only Marketingese — a language unintelligible to outsiders — rather than finding a shared vocabulary with people whose frame of reference stretches a little further than ours — and which is grounded on some solid scientific foundations rather than on mere marketing case law.

I should reveal a few prejudices here. I am a bit right wing, and also a bit Anglocentric. If I am asked to connect what we do to the world of big ideas, for me that means Adam Smith not Marx, Darwin not Freud, Dawkins not Derrida. I would be perfectly happy to accommodate testable theories from elsewhere. But we must realise that, while we may be obsessed with the superficial, this does not mean that what we do is trivial or should driven by the fleeting whims of fashion.

Bernbach was convinced that the fundamentals of human nature don’t change much; in fact they may be even older than he thought. In a passage from Spent that will fascinate Mark Earls, many herd animals (including dogs) exhibit many of the personality types of humans, as do most higher primates, cats, ferrets and (oddly) hedgehogs. This stuff is older than us.

As if that wasn’t enough, Miller also socks it to demography and that old planner’s crutch Maslow. Not before bloody time.

Buy this book.

The Wiki Man www.campaignlive.co.uk — 23.07.2009

The day the copy died …

Even if you think Jeremy Clarkson is the spawn of Satan, you will grudgingly find yourself sharing one or two of his opinions as expressed in this review of the Range Rover TDV8 Vogue SE. (I am fairly safe in this belief since my father, who generally regards Clarkson as the embodiment of materialistic vulgarity, sent it to me approvingly the day it came out. thetim.es/hIWhl)

What Mr Clarkson is saying is that he is a bit of a Platonist. That, while most categories contain many variants, and very nice they may be too, all are defined by a kind of archetype — a conception of a thing at its most perfect. He lists a few of these: France, the iPhone, Bacon & Eggs. The “Who’s the daddy?” campaign for Holsten Pils a few years back played off this same thought. It’s a game you can play with any category: brands (Coke), classical composers (Bach) or Prime Ministers (Churchill).

Now I have to confess something here. While I think originality is a wonderful thing, and while I’m all for stretching envelopes, pushing boundaries, throwing out rule-books, thinking outside boxes, casting off straitjackets and generally pissing against the wind, I do still believe there is a Platonic archetype for press advertising. In short, I still feel the full English breakfast of a press ad involves a big piccie at the top, a headline (and even a subhead) underneath, with two or three hundred words of intelligent, characterful chit-chat leading smoothly towards a logo or coupon at the end.

You might think of this as the David Ogilvy layout. Funnily enough I don’t. I often think of it as the CDP layout, since it was their ads in the Sunday Times colour supplement of the early 70s which made me first want to work in this business. Back then press advertisements were polite enough to engage you in conversation, rather than just barking out their proposition before drifting off to find someone more interesting.

What’s odd about this wonderful approach isn’t that it’s rare — it’s that it’s almost completely bloody dead. Why? It certainly isn’t consumers themselves, in fact I was amused to see this recent Eye Tracking research which completely vindicates this layout even 50 years on. (bit.ly/DWI3s)

10 years after David Ogilvy’s death, I think we should ask ourselves what went wrong here.

One problem, I think, is that people have started to conflate creativity with brevity. This is absolutely wrong. Good creative work has an immense respect for the value of the reader’s (or viewer’s) time, true, but that need not mean it is always brief: too much brevity can be as

much of a discourtesy as too little. Someone weeks away from buying a car will probably be happy reading a few hundred words about any car under consideration. (Someone who has just bought the car may eagerly read a full treatise on the thing for reasons of reassurance.) In any case, noone is forcing you to read copy: it’s simply there for those who want it — and prospective buyers often do.

Other possibilities? That no one can write long copy any more? I don’t entirely buy this, although it’s a contributory factor for sure. International awards — and the hurried way awards are judged? These probably have an effect. I certainly find it interesting — as someone who never went to art college — that Cannes entries often expect a ludicrously high degree of visual literacy in their audience (every year there are a few winners that I simply cannot understand) whereas very few make much use of language.

Research is also partly to blame, especially since all press ads are researched without body copy — an approach based on the moronic belief that you can research a proposition in the absence of a surrounding execution. Moreover every focus group nowadays contains one certified tyre-kicking twat who seeks to establish his superiority to his fellows through his disdain for all marketing. “I’m not reading all that crap” is a fairly typical way of expressing this.

And we should not forget the absurdity of client approval processes — without which all account handling departments would be half the size. David Abbott was supposedly first driven to produce posters for the Economist since getting press ads approved simply took far too long. And clients seem to have an aversion to running long copy ads. Whenever we write them and present them, clients always seem to love them in theory, but not to the extent of running them in practice. Why so?

People don’t read ads — said Howard Luck Gossage — they read what interests them: and sometimes it’s an ad. Here was a truly innovative man — whose ads were almost all as wordy as hell. The internet, rap music, talk radio — these booming media forms are all copy driven. Email marketing seems to work a treat. Why does everyone love words more than we do?

The Wiki Man www.spectator.co.uk — 01.08.2009

Exhibit A in Rod Liddle’s case against Twitter two weeks ago was a painful (but hardly representative) post by Stephen Fry.

Exhibit B was a quotation from a sceptical “youth” report written by a teenage intern at Morgan Stanley, who suggested that because he and his school-age contemporaries didn’t use Twitter, it was doomed. Hmmm.

This report did make me wonder how many people would want to befriend anyone whose idea of fun at age 15 is to work in a bank. But, even if his inference was wrong, his facts are largely right. Most people his age don’t need Twitter. For one thing, they don’t have many friends. Plus they already have an existing social network which serves them quite well: it’s called school.

When everyone you know lives or works in the same place, Twitter isn’t much use. It’s later in life, with that diaspora of friendship which follows a move to university or a new city that the thing begins to make sense. It provides people with a simple and painless way to keep up to date with the everyday lives of people dispersed hundreds of miles apart, and maintain that selfless exchange of random nuggets of information which is one of the foundations of friendship. Before condemning the apparently self-aggrandising ways people broadcast their daily trivia on Twitter, never forget the value of the unseen exchanges and responses that these generate. Think of a typical drinks party: without the coincidences, the chance eavesdroppings, the random connections, there would be no point in going. The value of Twitter comes when you are overheard.

To understand what I mean by this, consider how the telephone network worked in the small Welsh town where my father lived in the 1950s. A typical call ran as follows: “Oh, hello Mrs X, could you put me through to Newport station, please?” Mrs X (the operator) would then connect you to the station and you would ask for and be given the times of the following day’s trains to Bristol. So far, normal enough. But 30 seconds after you had hung up, the telephone would ring: “It’s Mrs X here from the exchange. If you want to get to Bristol, I remember hearing Mr Shaw saying he was driving down tomorrow morning, so maybe you could ring and ask him for a lift?”

Now I suppose being connected to this telephone exchange was pretty hopeless if you wanted to have an extramarital affair or run an international drugs cartel. But sometimes, as in this example, it was very useful. The same goes for Twitter. Collective knowledge is valuable. Mention that you are thinking of having a curry in Oxford and in minutes someone will come up with a recommendation (Spice Valley or Saffron, apparently). For this reason, some very clever people believe that the threat to Google, when it comes, will come from a collective social brain like this.

That all said, if you really can’t stand reading the self-obsessed ramblings of people born between 1955 and 1985, may I recommend the centenarian (twitter.com/ivyBean104). If she is too contemporary, try Samuel Johnson (twitter.com/DrSamuelJohnson). “Oatmeal (n.) In England, a Grain for Horses; in New York City, a Twenty Eight Dollar BREAKFAST.” Or, if you can’t stand people at all, there’s always Tower Bridge (twitter.com/TowerBridge).

The Wiki Man www.campaignlive.co.uk — 10.04.2009

Are you a capitalist or a creativist?

Recently, practitioners of experimental philosophy (trendily known as x-phi) described two different scenes to a randomly selected audience.

In the first, the vice president of a company explains to the president he has a new plan for the company that will maximise profits but will harm the environment. The president replies that he understands the environment will be harmed but doesn’t care; he tells the vice president to proceed. The selected audience are then asked whether the president is harming the environment intentionally. On the one hand, his intention is only to maximise profits but he is conscious that this also involves harming the environment. 82% said “yes.”

The second scene is identical to the first except the word harm is replaced with help. The vice president of a company explains to the president he has a new plan for the company that will maximise profits and will help the environment. The president replies that he understands the environment will be helped but doesn’t care; he tells the vice president to proceed. The people are then asked whether the president helped the environment intentionally.

Interestingly, only 23% say “yes.” There is a huge discrepancy here since, to a philosopher at least, the two examples are identical.

One interpretation of this is that, while an action based on self-interest that has bad effects is (unsurprisingly) seen as a bad thing, an action based on self-interest which has good effects is NOT seen as a particularly good thing. This reveals an essential asymmetry in human perception.

What it seems to show is that people are overwhelmingly intentionalists, not consequentialists. In other words, once they suspect an individual’s intentions are largely self-interested, it colours how they perceive the outcome. Hence they are far readier to attribute a bad outcome to self-interested behaviours than a beneficial one.

To anyone working in business, and in particular to those working in the many thousands of organisations which have spent the last fifteen years in thrall to a narrow, reductionist obsession with short-term shareholder value, this seems an important — and worrying — finding.

For it suggests the spectacular achievement of capitalist free markets in producing cheaper, better goods is often perceptually wasted, since most of us simply don’t much respect the selfish motivation behind the achievement.

To Adam Smith’s: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” We should add: “But don’t expect anyone to like the butcher very much.”

In short we have an economic system that is much better at delivering efficiency than it is at inspiring affection. The obsession with shareholder value has perhaps created autistic businesses — of a kind that nobody much wants to work for or buy from.

By nakedly pursuing a narrow obsession with profit, companies are damaging brand value — and ultimately shareholder value. Or, to put it another way, the problem with all this naked greed isn’t the greed, it’s the nakedness.

At a societal level, it means the benefits of competitive free market economics (choice, low prices, innovation) don’t really translate into happiness, gratitude or affection — as they are tainted by the self-interest with which they have been obtained.

And if you have ever wondered why people show such affection for public sector brands (such as the BBC, the Post Office, the NHS) even when their levels of service are, um, questionable, there’s your answer — for all their failings, they are untainted by perceptions of greed.

The perception of a non-selfish motivation seems inherently valuable. Or, put another way, nobody buys German cars because the Germans are greedy — they buy German cars because they believe that Germans are obsessively, indecently, neurotically obsessed with cars.

In the words of Jack Welch, widely seen as the father of the shareholder value movement, but now one of its harshest critics. “Shareholder value is an outcome — it’s not a strategy.”

Or as Eddie Izzard remarks: “I’m not a capitalist, I am a creativist. I want to make money so that I can create things. Suddenly all these people have come along who want to create things so they can make money.”

It’s an important distinction. Which are you? Certainly the best brand owners are creativists. Nike, Ford, Kellogg, Apple, Virgin were all created by people whose ambitions went far beyond self-enrichment.

There’s an interesting lesson here. Maybe greed isn’t bad for business.

It’s certainly bad for brands.

The Wiki Man www.campaignlive.co.uk — 31.1.2008

What can we do to make our industry luckier?

We have probably spent quite long enough trying to make this industry leaner and more efficient. We should try to make it jammier instead.

By and large, our clients all bar employees from social networking sites; agencies don’t. This is a small but telling detail — for it reveals something that we temperamentally understand which many businesses do not.

This is not a post about Facebook, you’ll be glad to hear. It is, instead, a post about how the world works. About how we can inadvertently make it slightly better. And about how, in their endless, dogged pursuit of a false efficiency, organisations can be rendered slightly useless. And stupid. (Remember that the word “dogged” is derived from the word “dog” meaning “energetic and stupid” — there should also be a word “catted” meaning lazy and devious; I would love to be described as exhibiting “catted determination.”)

Anyhow, this deterministic belief in false efficiency is very simple; it comes from the belief that improvement comes from the elimination of apparent waste.

There is a problem with this approach. It fails to pay any tribute to luck. If you dedicate your life to eliminating waste, you will undoubtedly succeed in a grubby kind of way. But, along with waste, you will be eliminating perhaps 90% of something far more important — your chances of getting really lucky. If you clamp down on frog-kissing, you don’t have much chance of finding a prince. This may explain why actuaries very rarely become rock stars.

The point is simple. If you look at all the really important breakthroughs made in any field, what you will find is that the unplanned, unintended or fortuitous connection plays just as great a role as the planned, the processed and the organised. This is why, fairly early on, Microsoft placed whiteboards along the corridors on the Redmond campus; for they found that the accidental meetings which took place in hallways were in fact more productive than the scheduled ones which happened in meeting rooms.

It raises a question. Why do we spend ages trying to perfect our processes and to refine our formal ways of working while spending almost no effort at all asking how we could get luckier. Or asking what we are doing that may be killing our luck.

There is a whole scientific literature on this subject. One book, called Serendipity, makes the point that most scientific advance comes not through the dogged and meticulous pursuit of a solution, but through a kind of inspired opportunism in response to a lucky connection. Another, called A Perfect Mess details how a messy desk and the accidental juxtaposition of two apparently unrelated papers led to a Nobel prize.

At a more mundane level, this explains why agencies produce better work faster when working on a pitch than in the real world — the very disorder of the process allows for more lucky breaks. This is why, in all honesty, great advertising is almost as likely to come from a creative factory tour as from a creative brief (sorry planners, but you know it’s true).

Where does Facebook come into all this? Russell Davies complains that there is no shared purpose in Facebook. I agree. Yet I think that’s exactly the point. Facebook is about nothing if it is not about serendipity, coincidence, the happy accident, the shared admission — quite simply it’s all about increasing one’s chances of becoming the lucky victim of a happy accident.

The Theory of Weak Ties, a landmark sociology paper of the 1970s provides backing for this. What this suggests (and it is largely borne out by experience) is that one’s peripheral contacts and vague acquaintances are more likely to be the agents of the major events in one’s life than one’s closest friends. It is your wider circle of friends who supply you with your luck. One’s close friends, being more similar, are relatively irrelevant to one’s fortunes.

Professor Richard Wiseman inadvertently demonstrated this when he sought to replicate the famous six degrees of separation experiment in which volunteers were asked to forward a letter to a named, addressed individual otherwise unknown to them. 20 of his 100 or so volunteers were unable to participate as “they simply did not know anyone who could help them in this task.” Fascinatingly almost all of these people had, on a prior questionnaire, stated that they believed themselves to be exceptionally unlucky in life. The degree to which you are open to the possibilities of random connections, he believes, disproportionately effects your real and perceived fortunes.

In other words your openness to the possibilities of random and apparently purposeless connections in many ways determines your success. Life really is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

So what does this mean for us?

First, don’t ban access to anything. You simply never know. Interestingly, Goldman Sachs, the one investment bank which seems to have a clue as to what it’s doing, does not ban Facebook access. Since its alumni network is perhaps the world’s most powerful entity, this may not be altogether silly. (I adopt a similar approach to conference attendance and speaking. A few times a year, diceman-style, I attend a seemingly random and semi-relevant event not specifically connected to what I do. These are invariably the best ones, and from them come the most interesting chance meetings.)

But there are a few more serious points here. Are we trying too hard to mimic our clients obsession with efficiency (not effectiveness, which is something different) when we should be making the case for chance? Is payment by the hour making us too focussed? Too dogged when we should be catted? How healthy is it to allocate people 100% to one client? Should we share briefs or problems more widely than we do? And should we make a bit more time for nothing in particular.

This last point reminds me of Henry Ford’s reaction to a consultant who questioned why he paid $50,000 a year to someone who spent most of his time with his feet on his desk. “Because a few years ago that man came up with something that saved me $2,000,000,” he replied. “And when he had that idea his feet were exactly where they are now.”

A man so obsessed with efficiency that he deliberately weakened car parts that never broke nonetheless understood that some wasted time isn’t wasted at all.

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Designed and published by It’s Nice That and Ogilvy Group UK.

©2011

ISBN

978-0-9564373-3-4

Photography

Inside cover: Julian Hanford

Part one: Jake GreenPart two: Owen Richards

Illustration

Throughout: Gordon Armstrong

Introduction, foreword and reading list: Stevie Gee Blog posts: David Sparshott

Thanks

Rory Sutherland

Sophie and the Sutherland family

Claire Beale, Christina Bell, Denise Birch, Lucia Davies, Paul O’Donnel, Patrick Fry, Bruno Giussani, Ben Greenish, Mike Guppy, Will Harvey, Sam Hodges, Will Hudson, Christine Lake, Poppy Nagra, Jamie McIntyre, Alex Moshakis, Rupert de Paula, Rob Peart, Linh Pham, Liv Siddall, Will Sutherland, Paul Smith, Sid Tomkins, Nicole Yershon, and everyone who tweeted…

The views and opinions expressed by the individual and those providing comment are theirs alone and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the publishers.

“The paramedics arrive and she says: ‘oh help there’s blood everywhere!’ This crash is outside Braintree, ‘there’s blood all over my face and I’m bleeding, it’s horrible!’ The paramedics say, ‘okay, first of all calm down, what’s your name?’ Her name’s Sharon. ‘Right Sharon, where are you bleeding from?’

She says: ‘Romford.’

Anyway, ha ha ha, sorry.”

Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Interview Part One

Interview Part Two

Reading List

Stories about Rory

Linda Works Miracles in the Kitchen while Trevor is ubiquitous with the cup that cheers

It's not always good to read certain books when you're too young

The Medium isn't just the message…the medium is the product

Let's put sales promotion at the heart of the agency

Venetia Thompson & Rory Sutherland list the pointless luxuries and trends that will be culled by the recession

It is wrong to equate the value of something with how much it costs. New technology for instance is cheap, and transforms our lives

Is advertising the problem? Or is advertising the solution?

The great unanswered question of the age

You’re never alone with a Strand

Why creatives should wear ties occasionally

Perhaps we were better when we were smashed

Who make better planners? Planners or creatives?

Do people in the music industry understand music? And do people in the advertising industry understand brands?

How many small cars would be sold if advertisements showed them being driven by pensioners?

Oh shit! My advertising works and I can’t explain why

It isn’t a framework, it’s a prison

People will make better choices when their decisions have rapidly visible results

If there is one country to which you should always carry a laptop, it’s France

A scientific approach to queueing — just what I’ve been waiting for

I have just passed a pub in gosport

The Nintendo Wife-O-Meter

The Facebook thing — allow me to explain

Does something that survives for 18 months deserve to be called a strategy

Once you pass 40, you need to try harder to like things you instinctively hate

When good marketers turn bad

200 years after his birth, will marketers discover Darwin?

The day the copy died

Exhibit A in Rod Liddle’s case against Twitter two weeks ago was a painful (but hardly representative) post by Stephen Fry

Are you a capitalist or a creativist?

What can we do to make our industry luckier?

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Credits