John Evans (5:33)

I mean, talk about dating. You've got the whole concept of speed dating and it feels like AI is doing that to marketing, isn't it? It's like speed marketing, yeah, everything's very fast. But you put a case together to say we should slow down our approach, shouldn't you?

Rory Sutherland (5:44)

Something that Jeremy Bullmore, the late Jeremy Bullmore said, which is that the most valuable thing about advertising may actually be the process you go through to produce an advertisement rather than the advertisement itself. And it's quite an interesting thought, which is the questions you've got to ask, what in, I think in cybernetics is called business philosophy. What are you, for what purpose do you serve? What makes you different from other people? Quite deep strategic questions which generally remain unasked until you have to produce an ad. And so the only concern for me is that if you shortcut the process to arrive very quickly at a cheap and adequate end result, that's fine, unless it's the process that's valuable rather than the end result. So the example I always give is a parallel of that, okay, Is that all of you, when you, if you went to university and you wrote essays at university, okay, you may have kept them, you probably didn't, you probably threw them away the second you graduated, to be honest. But if you have kept your undergraduate essays, say they're totally worthless, to be absolutely honest, okay? You know, it's extremely unlikely, unless you're some sort of genius, that there's anything of any value in them, but the value was in having to write them. And so there is this issue which is we tend to assume that the end product is, is the thing of value, not the journey. But sometimes that isn't true, actually, that actually the shortcuts are really dangerous. I mean, I always think it was a terrible mistake for agencies to charge by the hour, but because it meant clients got hold of us really, really late, okay? Because the meters running when we were on commission, you brought the agency in day one, right, because they were free, okay? And so, you know, actually asking a load of, I mean, a lot of people think this, that actually the most valuable thing you do in advertising may be the really silly questions you ask at the beginning of the process where you just actually probably the most successful thing you can do is probably to rewrite the question or redefine the problem. And I think we're jumping towards execution too hastily. I also think, by the way, for consumers there's a value to slow AI because we don't want to make optimal decisions instantaneously. If I'm going to go on holiday, okay, I want that to be a sort of two month or three month period of exploration because we refine our preferences in the act of searching for things. You know, when you go shopping or for that matter, when you choose a holiday or when you choose a house. Okay. If you talk to estate agents, they say everybody comes along, they all have a list of criteria for their perfect home, and they always end up buying a house that meets few or sometimes none of those initial criteria. Probably true of the people you've married as well, to be absolutely honest. You know, if we're. And that's because we actually refine our preferences by the act of searching for what we want. In other words, we're refining what we want as part of the process of looking for it. Yeah. Okay. And I think, you know, there's a danger that the assumption in all tech people is that free is better than expensive and instantaneous is better than slow. Well, I think the lesson of email is that, no, actually when you make something free, everybody gets over communicated to and when you make it instantaneous, you know, actually there's a downside to that.

John Evans (9:08)

Do you think we can get too obsessed with the data? Because I think so much of this is making decisions based on data. But as you say, very well, we're irrational people. We don't make decisions in the logical way that the algorithm expects us to.

Rory Sutherland (9:20)

Who here's really keen on like police work, detective fiction, you know, real life serial killer stuff? Yeah, you all are, aren't you? Yeah. Okay. No, no, I mean, I think, I think it's really interesting because one of the weird discoveries I made by writing the book is the market for marketing is inordinately bigger than we think it is. Okay. People in venture capital are fascinated by psychological solutions. You know, there are people, you know, CEOs are weirdly, you know, financed people can be. There's actually a much bigger market for marketing than we've envisaged. And so one of the weirdest sort of people I go and talk to occasionally are the police. And it strikes me that the police have make a very important distinction if you're trying to solve a crime, which is between the investigative phase and the evidential phase, okay. Eventually you have to prove your case. Okay? Now, however, what would happen if someone's murdered? The police are very similar to marketers, by the way, detective work. That wonderful guy Greg Hahn, who runs the agency.

John Evans (10:23)

Oh, yeah.

Rory Sutherland (10:24)

Okay. He's also obsessed with crime fiction and true life crime. And you start off, you find someone. It's very similar to marketing because not everybody's telling us the truth. They're not necessarily deliberately lying, but they're not giving us the full story, and we're having to deal deal with imperfect information, okay? And the information that's evidential may not be valuable, and the information that's valuable may not be evidential, okay? So let's take this example. What you do as a cop is you find a dead body somewhere and you basically, you'll go door to door around the neighbors and you'll ask an incredibly open question like, did anybody notice anything unusual on the evening of, you know, Thursday the 17th? Okay? And someone will say something. Again, purely anecdotal. Well, a funny guy in a white van drove back and forth five times. I thought it was a bit weird. Now, no evidential value, purely anecdotal, but it tells you what to investigate next, tells you where to direct your attention next. And then you may get some CCTV footage up and you see, oh, look, this is the white van the person mentioned. And then you look at the license plate number and you see if the person driving it's a bit dodgy or has any previous. Right? And you proceed from that. Now, eventually you have to arrive at a position of certainty because you can't obviously imprison someone for 35 years for driving a white van. In a funny way, you eventually have to get evidential information, but you shouldn't start with the assumption that only the evidence, only hard data has anything to tell you. And I think, you know, I always joke about this, which is there was tons and tons of really reliable data that said in 1912 that icebergs weren't found that far south in the Atlantic. But one anecdotal piece of information, which is iceberg dead ahead, okay, Effectively renders all of that other information completely irrelevant if you're on the bridge of the Titanic, okay, Arrived a bit late as it happened. But in the police case, I mean, I always find it fascinating because, you know, Peter Sutcliffe was partly caught because He. He was in the Bradford red light district and he parked his car in a funny way, okay? Which is most people handy tip, as I said, you know, if you want to, you know, know the etiquette of the Bradford red light district one day, apparently you park with your windscreen facing the wall because then people can't see what's happening on the back seat. But Sutcliffe had parked facing outwards as if to make a quick getaway with. After killing his victim. And that was one of the things that caused the cops just to pay a bit of attention, go back to the point of the arrest and find that he'd secreted the. His weaponry in the. In the nettles where he'd gone for a piss. Okay, now again, this is the distinction between anecdotal and evidential. And I, I also think it. It's incredibly disturbing if we start privileging things that we call data above things that other forms of information a. Because all big data comes from the same place, the past, okay? There is no data about the future. I thought there was a load of bollocks around coronavirus because people kept talking about the science, right? But it's a novel coronavirus, okay, which means it's not like other coronaviruses. So therefore, by definition there isn't any science yet, okay? And it was actually airborne, not spread by contact. And it seemed to take them about eight, you know, it seemed to take them about 10 months to figure this out, okay? I actually bought one of those Philips air filters, got widely abused online for buying it. And it turned out I was right, okay? Because I thought, thought I thought, okay, postman aren't getting ill. So it seems unlikely that it spread by physical contact, okay? I was basically keep an eye on the local sorting office mortality figures, you know, for a clue, as that's what I call the investigative phase, okay? And I think this weird obsession, okay? So anybody who, who's the fan of Roger L. Martin in the room, Anybody. Brilliant, there's one at least excellent, wonderful, Toronto Canadian business guy, kind of the heir to Peter Drucker. And he makes this point that business, okay, business is probabilistic, but everybody wants to pretend it's deterministic, okay? They want to pretend that you can be definite and sure and know the future in advance. The reality is that you're placing a bet on one particular version of the future. I would argue that marketing is a casino with pretty good odds, but it's still a casino at some level. And what we did as marketers Is we got enthralled to all the techie people and said, no, no, this can be just as exact a science as, say, logistics or engineering or Newtonian physics. And actually, since we deal fundamentally with the future and we deal with human psychology, which is immensely complex, that idea that you can actually have all the data you need to make a robust decision, as if the context isn't going to change or the future isn't going to be different from the past, is just completely unsafe. And I think, I think it comes from actually not. It comes from the urge to look scientifically, not from the urge to be scientific.

John Evans (15:27)

It's a bit like in corporate life. People would rather be confidently wrong than probably right.

Rory Sutherland (15:34)

So they love a bit of incremental certainty. Yeah, but actually, if you think about it, most business incentivizes people for being incrementalists, doesn't it? You know, if you can grow things by 3%, 4% a year, you tend to get promoted. Okay. If you grow things by 10% a year for three years and then mess up, okay, you're out on your ear. So undoubtedly there's this tendency in business people, effectively, they would prefer to have a very certain predictable and uninteresting game. I mean, this is one of the weirdest things we discovered running a behavioral science practice, which is every now and then, as we would predict, I'm not suggesting this happens every time, but every now and then you have a complete breakthrough discovery. Okay? So with one client, an airline, very early client, we basically did a little change to their website, which cost 25,000 quid, and they paid us 25,000 quid for the advice and it made them £10 million in extra revenue that year and every year thereafter.

John Evans (16:29)

That's amazing.

Rory Sutherland (16:29)

And so we thought, okay, that's it, basically, job done, they never came back. Okay. And then I realized that maybe they don't want to do that all that often. Maybe it's because actually that whenever anything spectacular happens, the finance people or the logistics people just claim all the credit because the marketers never really get the credit, do they? For a breakthrough, you probably set the.

John Evans (16:49)

Bar too high, haven't you? They're thinking, how do we repeat that?

Rory Sutherland (16:51)

How do we repeat that? I mean, maybe there is something like. But, but also, I admit the process is imperfect and it has to be experimental, but I mean, we've done that about, you know. You know, we've done it just recently actually, with a cinema chain where we literally multiplied the number of people who pre order food with their tickets by a factor of 27. Okay. You can achieve these complete butterfly effects. And it seems weird that we spend very little time butterfly hunting because we'd rather do something. And this is why, you know, when the finance director becomes the CEO, it's always that little death rattle for a business. Right? Okay. And that's because finance people are deterministic and they adore predictability. And as St. Roger Martin says, you must read this guy. It's fantastic. Right? Roger Martin says, fundamentally, the job of the CEO is you have to accept that business is probabilistic.

John Evans (17:42)

Interesting. Which of the behavioral science insights do you think have got the most ability to transform business or marketing? That we're not talking about going back to your airline example.

Rory Sutherland (17:52)

Well, that's a perfect example of what I'd call context. Okay, so the most interesting finding in psychology is we make decision according to context. By the way, there was another discovery that simply changing the button, the booking button, from Find Flights to Find My Flights, that increased sales by about 5% as well. By the way, Amazon does this all the time. I mean, Nick, stuff from Amazon, basically, if in doubt. But context, Context has a huge effect on behavior. Okay. Simple. Very simple. By the way, that's why a lot of behavioral economics experiments don't replicate, because if you change the context even slightly, people behave in a totally different way. And it's obvious why. Our brains are wired that way. If you're walking down a busy street, you don't really notice footsteps. Whereas if you're walking down a dark alley at night and you hear footsteps, you react completely differently. Okay, and one of my arguments is, look, actually, often in marketing, we think, gosh, to get people to do this, we've got to change the minds of a million people. And our argument will be, well, maybe it's easier just to change one context. If you're EasyJet, people used to book flights. I'm old enough to remember where you needed to fly somewhere. You went to a travel agent, okay? And then what you do is you're EasyJet, and you put the phone number. It was a phone number before it was a web address. I'm that old. Seriously. Okay, you put the phone number on the side of the plane, and the whole thing is, if you want to fly somewhere, you phone EasyJet. If you change fundamentally the channel or whatever through which people do things, their behavior changes automatically because they're making a decision in a different place. And so that's, you know, that's probably the behavioral science thing, which, for example, has manifested itself in 90% of people now having some sort of pension because it was changed from opt in to opt out. You know, there are these absolutely monumental effects. I'm not, by the way, I'm not making a huge promise that you can do it every time, but shit, it's worth looking, isn't it?

John Evans (19:47)

You know, I'm fascinated by a concept you came up the other day called reverse benchmarking. We're all obsessed, aren't we, with competition and how do we match the competition? But you came up with a kind of a counter idea which I thought was quite interesting.

Rory Sutherland (19:58)

I nicked this from a guy called Will Gadara who has written a book called Unreasonable Hospitality. So if there's anybody there who has any kind of service component to your business. Will Godara's book. It's like Jeremy Bulmore said, the best books about advertising aren't about advertising. And Will go. Dara's book is about how he took a restaurant from number 50 in the world. It was 11 Madison park in New York. It was. It was in some restaurant awards, number 50 in the world. And he took it to number one. And this is great story because he's a natural kind of game theorist. And what Will did was he said, okay, we're number 50 in the world. He took his team, mixture of people from the kitchen, from front of house, etc, to dinner in the best restaurant in the world. The restaurant that had scored number one last time around. Obviously, as he said, it was really, really good. You know, you'd kind of expect that, wouldn't you? Okay. And his team were going, God, that's really, really good. Let's copy that. And, ooh, look, they did that really well, you know, ooh, my napkin's in the shape of a swan. Let's do. I'm making that up. I'm sure they don't do that, but, you know, okay, but. Oh, that's good. Let's copy that. And Will said, no, there's no point in bench. I mean, benchmarking is actually also McKinsey. And people make a fortune selling this bullshit. But it's just a way of making you more similar to your immediate competitors, really. And it's bad for the consumer because it reduces choice and variety and it makes competing businesses more and more similar. So they tend to end up in a very crowded space and then head into that kind of death spiral. Will Godara said, no, I'm not interested in the things they did well. I'm not surprised they did things well. Said, what are the things they actually did weirdly badly because we're going to double down on those things. And they came up with two things. The coffee was nothing special. You could kind of have decaf or regular coffee, but there was no choice of beans. There was nothing special there. And also the three or four people in the party who'd wanted to drink beer, not wine have been kind of treated like second class citizens. You know, it's kind of like we've got Carlsberg and Heineken on draft. Nothing wrong with those beers, by the way, but it's not remotely equivalent to the kind of experience you get if you were discussing the wine list, okay? And he said, okay, those are the two weak spots. And he took two people from his staff. One of them was, I think, in the kitchen and was obsessed with single origin coffee. And he said, from now on, you're the coffee sommelier. And he took another guy who was, I think, front of house, who was obsessed with craft beers, and he said, you're now the beer sommelier. So when he went into his restaurant three months later and you said, actually, what beers do you have? The guy would come over with a beer menu and actually do food pairings. Say, well, you're having fish. So this citrus IPA from, you know, the Napa Valley is particularly appropriate. Okay. Now the great thing about that is, okay, being good in the same way as everybody else is good. Benchmarking yourself doesn't really attract attention. Whereas if you're a beer drinker in a fancy restaurant, you're used to being treated like shit, relatively speaking. Okay? So when they suddenly take your preference for beer over wine really seriously, it also turned out that these craft brewers were so flattered that a really top class restaurant was taking their beer seriously that they're practically sending them the stuff for free. So it was, it was quite lucrative as well. But I quite often. You quite often stay at a hotel and they say after our 200 million dollar renovation program, to make your hotel room look like every other fucking hotel room you've ever stayed in. And the clever thing there is reverse benchmarking. It's don't take what your competition are doing well and copy it. Take what your competition are doing badly and double down on it. And I think, I think, I think as an exercise, I mean, Will, I think, invented the practice with his natural game theory mentality. He's a great believer in, look, you know, merely being as good as someone else is a bit pointless if you want people to really notice. And there's a whole theory of psychology which You. You in fact have done, haven't you, that the things we pay attention to, the things we find interesting, are the things we didn't expect.

John Evans (24:04)

Totally, yeah. Surprise. I mean, surprise. Surprise is hugely important because it. It lodges in your memory. You know, you remember what you're surprised about. There's a slightly random piece of work to do. Extraordinary cost of dull, actually. Murray s. Davis in 1972, did. Did a bit of work on what makes things interesting. And it turns out that denying an assumption of your audience is what makes something interesting, which is perfect behavioral science. It's like you think it's this, but actually it's that, you know, it kind of pulls the rug from under you.

Rory Sutherland (24:31)

Which I think is what makes it funny enough. It's sort of closely linked to comedy because comedians often play the same trick, don't they? They take something which is quite often a joke, involves rapid recontextualization. You're assuming one thing, and then it suddenly flips. Okay. And that. That works, I think, in exactly the same way. I mean, there is a whole theory of brain science. I won't get into the free energy principle, not least because I don't understand it myself, but. Which says that effectively most of what we perceive is a prediction, and we use the limited bandwidth in our optic nerves and our ears to correct for prediction error. Funnily enough, it's exactly the same kind of computational process that your. Your TV uses. So the reason your sky dish isn't 15ft across or something is because most pixels on a TV, it's how JPEGs work or MPEGs. Okay. There's an expectation value for every pixel, and the data is only used to correct when the expectation value is wrong. So rather than having to describe every pixel in intricate detail going, it's a brown one. It's a brown one. It's a brown one. They might use much less data by going, brown pixel, and then 15 pixels, exactly as you'd expect. Ooh, there's an unusual pixel. And consequently you need much less data. Okay. To form a picture. And it looks as if the human brain has bizarrely come up with exactly the same process as Samsung. Okay. Albeit over a longer period, which is basically the inter. The brain develops an expectation, and what we notice is the thing that we weren't expecting. Which probably explains why a lot of good ads have that, you know, peculiar element of the, you know, very similar to a joke where there's a flip somewhere in the ad.

John Evans (26:19)

Yeah, 100%. I want to talk to you about TikTok and your, your recent TikTok fame.

Rory Sutherland (26:23)

Yeah.

John Evans (26:23)

Which has been amazing to watch. What. And you said something to me on the day which was quite interesting about how going back to probabilistic idea that the more well known you are, the more chance there is of kind of good things, good things happening. And I think that's something that's. I mean, Greg Kahn says this in Mischief, which is a brilliant quot which is fame is a luck multiplier.

Rory Sutherland (26:42)

Yeah. I think one of the problems we probably make is that when we do advertising and we invest in becoming famous, first of all it's compounding effect, okay? So the more famous you are already, the more easy it is to get more famous, okay. That there is. It's a bit like your pension, you know, it's very slow and boring at first and then by the time you're 55, you go, where did all this money come from? You know, it works a bit like that. So it's not a linear thing. And so I think we often measure investment in marketing as if it's linear and then if we're disappointed by the early results, rather like for the first five years I had a pension, I thought it was a total waste of time. Why didn't I spend this down the pub? Right? And you know, if you expect linear results, you might be disappointed early on. And I think we've got Les Burnett in the audience, okay? There's a hell of a lot to be said for persistence, for keeping going because the returns come late, but they come big, so it's compounding. The second thing I think that's really interesting is that it doesn't really work in the. So the main value of fame, Greg calls it. Greg Hunt calls it a luck multiplier. Nassim Taleb, who I know quite well, would say that the purpose of being famous is to increase your surface area exposure to positive upside optionality. Okay? It's not that being famous, and I'm not talking about myself here, I'm talking about brands, okay? It's not that being famous helps you necessarily achieve something you intended to achieve. It makes it much more likely you'll become lucky in ways you didn't expect. Okay? So let's say, okay, you know, because I'm on TikTok, I now get requests to speak from companies I didn't even know existed, okay? That's the point, okay? Now I think if you look at the value of a company being famous rather than obscure, okay. I think it manifests itself in so many different ways. It's impossible actually to put a value on it. So, okay, if you're the chief executive of Rolls Royce Aero Engines, okay, if you phone anybody in the world, apart from kind of, you know, a few presidents, they'll return your call, okay? People come and work for you for less money. They stay for longer, okay? People come and ask you to supply things whose existence you were previously unaware of. You get exposed to options and possibilities which you could never discover for yourself. But because you're famous, magnetically they come to you. And so I would argue that actually what fame does is it's luck. It increases your odds in the casino of life. Now, my kids when they were teenagers, okay, it's very annoying having teenage kids because they're obsessed with going to parties on Saturday night, okay, Rather than doing what any healthy person would do, which is sitting there watching YouTube documentaries about traction engines, what you do at the age of 59, you know. But it suddenly occurred to me that they're being completely rational. They don't do a cost benefit analysis for every party they attend, okay? They don't kind of have a party strategy. But what they know is that if you go to a lot of parties, you might get lucky. And if you don't go to any parties, you won't. And when I say get lucky, I don't specifically mean sexually, although it can include that it could be sexually lucky, romantically lucky. You get invited on holiday with someone, you get invited to another party, that's even better. But there's simply a value to just maximizing your surface area, okay? Because more opportunities then are presented to you. And the great thing about an opportunity is you can choose to take it or ignore it. But I think, I think the way we look at things is in the way we look at marketing investment, particularly long term marketing investment is ridiculously kind of Newtonian. It's as if there's this kind of linear relationship between input and output which you get in a very, very crude machine. But an awful lot of this. I mean, actually the best reason to be famous is that stuff happens to you which you may not have planned for. I mean, to what extent our lives are actually planned. They obviously are. In retrospect, we all pretend that where we are now is where we intended to be. It's not really like that at all, is it? I mean, you know, in fact, most people's lives probably are overwhelmingly determined by six or seven really lucky accidents. And so the great book, by the way, Brian Klass book called Fluke, which is really, really Interesting on this, which points out that actually the biggest things that happen in the world, World War I, was down to the fact that actually a chauffeur took a wrong turn in Sarajevo, okay, The guy who tried to assassinate the Archduke couldn't find him and given up. So he went to a cafe to have a coffee and smoke a cigarette. And suddenly the chauffeur of the car takes a wrong turn down a one way street. It's a car that apparently is incredibly difficult to get into reverse, okay, because it's 19, whatever it is, 14 or 13, and you know, the rest is history. But actually the actual events that created it are incredibly small. And so that business of just improving your odds seems to be a perfectly good, you know, reason to advertise. But we've come into this weird idea where everything has to be attributable. And the trouble is that the best things, you know, aren't really always attributable, are they? You know, they're people who, I mean, I've got people who are really good friends of mine. I've got no idea how we met, okay. Genuinely. And I think this obsession with attribution is a false God, because I mean, physics went through it with Laplace's Demon, the idea that if you only knew what every atom was doing, you could completely predict the future of the universe. Okay? Meteorology went through it and abandoned it when it realized, you know, butterfly effect. Okay? Economics, you know, there's a whole book attacking Ricardo Economics calls this the Ricardian vice, which is the idea that complex things can be reduced to a formula. And I think we've just, I think the whole marketing industry has just gone through the same fundamentally pursuit of a, of a kind of a false trail, really.

John Evans (32:42)

Yeah. With that being the case, and how do we create the environment or the culture to operate like that? Because where everything's pushing us down.

Rory Sutherland (32:50)

The data entrepreneurs are really interesting and founders because they never demand that stuff. I mean, John Roberts, who founded ao, is the largest buyer of bears in the uk. I mean, toy bears obviously be weird. And he's very similar. They deliver their own washing machines and appliances and they deliver them themselves. And he says, well, that gives us an advantage because most people don't deliver their own stuff. So since we're delivering our own stuff, we'll have a box of these little green branded merch bears in the back of the van. And if the household we're delivering to has kids, we'll give each of the kids a branded bear. Right? As John says, he Goes, look, how do I prove that works? Well, you could prove it works, okay, if you're anally retentive, you can have a control sample to whom you don't give a bear. You can even have a more extreme cell where you go, look, children, here's a bear, which I'm not going to give to you, which is the bastard cel. Yes, okay. And you could compare their Repeat purchase over 15 years and you might have some reliable data to tell you what the ROI is on the bears. But John just goes, look, if it's a good idea, some things are just a good idea. You can't necessarily prove them to within three decimal places, but you still do them. And, you know, I think it's true that nearly all, you know, entrepreneurs and founders are perfectly happy doing things and making subjective decisions. But we've created such a paranoid atmosphere in business that most of our work nowadays isn't actually making decisions, it's winning arguments. Is there anybody in the room, let's be honest, who can make any decision at all without consulting someone else, like HR or compliance? Is there anybody who can make an individual decision? I can't. You know, nobody can hire anybody, nobody can fire anybody, nobody can give anybody a pay rise. It always involves dealing with these vast, growing, weird, like, like, it's almost like corporate oncology, the growth of like HR and finance. Right, okay. Because, you know, I'm kind of getting, I mean, it's white collar welfare, basically, isn't it? Hr? You know, if we're being brutal about it, it's not a proper job, but also it should be our job, deciding who, you know, you know, deciding the fate of people should be decided by people close to those people themselves.

John Evans (35:08)

Well, it's a bit like the PR department, isn't it? Like there to tell you what not to say, you know, stop you saying what you think.

Rory Sutherland (35:14)

There's a great phrase which comes from. Anybody read Dan Davis's book the Unaccountability Machine? I know Antonis has seriously read this book. He's written three books, one about financial booms, one about this theory of unaccountability traps in business, that we try and create these spaces where nobody's responsible. And the third book's a history of the Brompton Bicycle Company, so he's quite broad. But he quotes this phrase from cybernetics, which, by the way, cybernetics was a really, really interesting area of business investigation, which is about the flow of information within companies, which was completely ruined by the fact that two or three years after it got Big doctor who created the Cybermen. And so nobody took it seriously. It's a bit like nuclear power. It's a really good idea with a really bad branding problem. Them, okay? And the great phrase from cybernetics is the purpose of the system is what it does. And we noticed that press offices are so paranoid about bad publicity and they demand that everybody only says things of incredibly boring boilerplate, kind of anodyne content to the press, which means that no journalist ever contacts you ever again. Okay? So the net effect of a press office is to keep you really, really obscure. And so it's, it's a, I think it's a really useful thing, which is don't ignore what the ostensible purpose of any business function is. Say, what's the ultimate effect? Because the, the purpose might be entirely, you know, benign and worthy, but the net effect may just be it slows everything down impossibly so that nobody can do anything, or it makes people absurdly risk averse, which I think is, I mean, one thing that worries me just in general, okay, is in this atmosphere where you can create a scandal out of anything, okay? I really worry that a large number of companies have just lost the appetite for communicating because they simply go, look, keep your heads down, stay behind the parapet because anything you say might be used against you, okay? So let's not communicate anymore.

John Evans (37:19)

Talking of risk aversion, I thought it's quite amusing that the Chancellor was asking the regulators to come up with ideas for boosting the economy, which is just hilarious. If you took a behavioral science approach to our economy, what, what would you do to boost growth?

Rory Sutherland (37:34)

One really interesting area is, well, bring back the COI for a start. You don't know what that is, do you? It used to be a thing called the Central Office of Information, which did government advertising. And it would basically, it was a way that government could communicate to citizens. At the moment, people go, there's no need for that because we can use the press, okay, to communicate. Now, the press is a massive distorting lens with a huge negativity bias whenever it comes, regardless of the government you have in place, okay? There are also massive asymmetries in information which I find really, really interesting. So one of the interesting problems I noticed is it doesn't matter how good the NHS is, it will always say it's in a terrible state. Okay? Now, if you're an American hospital, right, you make money from patients. Got it? Right. So it's in your interest to pretend you're a better hospital than you really are, because then you get more patients, right? And consequently, if you work for the Mayo Clinic and you went on TV and said, look, frankly, the Mayo Clinic shit, you know, their patients lined up, we haven't got enough CAT scanners, there are people lined up in the corridors, none of your colleagues would ever talk to you ever again, right? Because you'd basically dissed their source of revenue, okay? Now, in the nhs, it's the opposite, because you get money from government, so it's in your interest to keep saying how shit everything is so you can get more money. And if you. If you imagine this, okay, Imagine you're an NHS consultant dermatologist, right? And you appeared on this Morning and you said, frankly, the NHS is fine. I've got all the ointments I need, I go home early on Fridays, I've got a really nice office with a swivel chair and I make 200 grand a year, right? I don't know what people are complaining about. Your career will be over in the NHS because you committed the unforgivable sin of saying that things are quite good, okay? So I'm not suggesting, by the way, the NHS isn't beleaguered. I'm saying that even if it isn't, it will still pretend that it is, and therefore there's a big bias going on there. So I bring back the coi, so that there was a way of government communicating to citizens, including some good news. I'd also look at things which I find really fascinating, which is because we always work. This really pisses me off about ad agencies, okay? Ad agencies are like panda bears. They only eat bamboo, right? And you know what I mean? And ad agencies, even though we haven't been paid on commission since, like, 1992, they only eat brand communication budgets. You know, they go, is there a media budget over there? And they all go down to can. And they all try and impress the same 150 people who all have big media budgets. And what annoys me about this is there are loads and loads of problems which don't have a media budget attached, where you could still bring real value, creativity particularly, okay? And one of the biggest examples of that is category problems. So two people have approached me, really fascinating, good ideas. Share them. Okay? One guy is head of the Civil Aviation Authority. Now, I don't know what he wants to talk to me about, but I suspect it's, how do you get public acceptance of drones, okay? Because the problem you have with drones is that if you have drone delivery, the hundred moped accidents you avoid invisible, whereas the one person whose Pekingese is wounded by a falling Heinz Baked Beans is the front of the Daily Mail, okay? So you have this fundamental problem with new technology that quite often the negatives are really, really salient, but the positives are invisible. And a new thing that frightens us is much, much scarier than the absence of an old thing that used to frighten us, which we'd become acclimatized to. And so, you know, I think there's some really, really interesting opportunities for marketing people to look at category problems. The one I always talk about, by the way, is electric cars, right? Okay, there's range anxiety. I've said this repeatedly. Sorry to be a bore about it. Range anxiety has two components, range and anxiety. Now, lots and lots of scientists are spending billions and billions of dollars trying to increase range by increasing the energy density of batteries, right? It's not cheaper to reduce anxiety, right? Just reassure people that it'll be really easy to charge their car. For one thing, when you look at. If you've got. You've gone electric, you're not poisoning the planet.

John Evans (41:41)

No, no.

Rory Sutherland (41:42)

How many of you gone electric, by the way? Would any of you go back to petrol just for interest? Nobody. Now, the interesting thing there, okay, a very similar behavioral parallel here. I call this an air fryer effect, which is there are things that nobody wants until you have one, at which point you never go back. Okay? Japanese toilets, mattress toppers, air fryers, okay, okay. Once you've got one, okay, you know, someone wants to buy. My wife was resisting the air fryer. She protects, like kitchen surface space, like it's the fucking Somme. You have to fight over every bloody two feet, okay? And I finally got the air fryer in. No going back, right? And the electrical, there was a similar thing with bricks, by the way, with automatic transmission, right? All Brits came up with utterly bullshit arguments against driving an automatic, which is. No, no, no, I hate the loss of control. I really enjoy the. I really enjoy double G clutching when I'm stuck in traffic on the west way, okay? What happens is nobody who ever bought an automatic car ever went back to a manual car. And I think, only, I think 97% of people who go electric basically stay electric. Now, by the way, range anxiety isn't irrelevant in the us, right? Big distances, very cold weather. Your mum lives in Boise, Idaho, which is 600 miles away. Range is an issue. Britain's tiny, you know, the Netherlands, Britain, Belgium, okay? There's no need for your, your car energy gauge, your battery to say 87. And then you drive a bit down to 86 and you start getting a bit anxious. Like your mobile phone, right? I'm married to someone who, who allow her mobile phone to go down to, like, single digits. I start hyperventilating below 50%, okay? And the, the crazy thing there is just say 80% plus and then eventually say 70% plus. Now, obviously, when you're at 11% or 5%, you need individual digits, but your petrol gauge never gave you an individual percentage level, did it? Yeah, right, okay. Just said 3/4 full half full quarter full 8th full. Shit, the lights come on.

John Evans (43:47)

It sounds it to you. I play the game of can I get to the petrol station with 1% left?

Rory Sutherland (43:52)

You know, like, see how actually, I mean, you could reduce anxiety. Now, the problem with. The problem with increasing range rather than reducing anxiety is a lot of electric cars are probably heavier than they need to be, more expensive than they need to be. There are fewer batteries available because an awful lot of kilowattage is just sitting unused. Because 95% of the time, you know, I mean, the worst people are Londoners who go, oh, no, it's terrible. Can't get an electric car because there's no way of charging at home, you know. You know, because I haven't got a garage or a drive. And you go, you live in London, you twat. You can only drive at 20 miles an hour. And it's an unusual day where you go more than five miles, Right? Yeah, okay. And so people. It's exactly like automatic transmission. I think if you could accelerate adoption in the populace by doing category advertising, and we used to do category advertising and advertising a lot. What happened is, you know, the ad campaign, if you want to get ahead, get a hat. Hat. The way that worked in 1930, okay? It was. People noticed in 1930 or 1940 that people weren't wearing hats very much. And so the Hat Makers Federation of the UK would impose a 1% levy on all their members and they'd use it to fund an advertising campaign for the category of hat wearing. Okay? Now, the Milk Marketing Board was presumably kind of that kind of thing, okay? There are a load of dairies, there are a lot of people will promote milk centrally as a drink rather than having lots of competing dairies. Now, what we have in electric cars, we have lots of competing car brands all competing on the basis of range, which is emphasizing a negative, okay? We're less negative than the other electric car. When someone should be saying, yeah, I think you're good, basically, they're Just a better car, aren't they? Okay. It's just nicer to drive, it's quieter, you know, it's more comfortable in every respect. And the performance is better when you need it. Okay. And nobody's doing that job because you've got a load of competing interests. We don't have the equivalent of the Hat Makers Federation. I think why that fell apart was probably globalization because, you know, at the time those campaigns worked, nearly all the hats sold in the UK were probably made in the uk. Now if you did a category campaign, well, you, there'd be a free rider problem with lots of Chinese hat manufacturers picking up most of the gains. Okay, who hadn't paid in. But I do think there's scope for, you know, one of the tragedies of marketing is that there aren't budgets for category campaigns. You know, I think there are a lot of problems you could solve, but maybe, maybe it isn't an advertising problem. Maybe you don't need a media budget here. What I've talked about with drones is, look, if you can, you know, if you can say that all drone delivery services have to prioritize emergencies like delivering a defibrillator, okay, then what you've arguably done is you've created a really reliable, fast 24 hour network for delivery of essential things. And it's funded by the people who are ordering a coffee from Starbucks. Maybe you could get people to accept it in that way. I don't know, maybe there's some cunning little way we can reframe things.

John Evans (46:53)

Now we've managed to get through 45 minutes really quickly, which seems like time warp.

Rory Sutherland (46:58)

You have a question which is my biggest regret.

John Evans (47:00)

I do. Well, because I asked LinkedIn as to give me some questions for you and Scott and we got about 180 of them, which is amazing. The most voted for question was from Tom Goodwin and he said, what issue have you been profoundly wrong about and why?

Rory Sutherland (47:17)

There's a very amusing one which was, I've been wrong about a hell of a lot, by the way. And I think you should be wrong about quite a bit on the same grounds that if you, if you're never wrong about anything, it's that old phrase that if you've never missed a plane, you've spent too much of your life at airports. You know what I mean? Okay. You're being too cautious, effectively. But one of the weird things I was wrong about very early on, it must have been shortly after the ipod came out, never mind the iPhone. I actually met the guy who named the Podcast, Wow. And I remember thinking, this will never take off. Ironically, in fairness, I was a bit more measured than that. I thought I could see that it would work in the United States, where they didn't have Radio 4 and you had a lot of drive time. But I thought in the uk, I thought. But if you think about it, okay, I think. I don't know if Scott's arrived already to contradict me on this, but he always says that all the ideas I've invented, I've invested in have been stupid until they aren't, you know. Now imagine, okay, you're someone in Britain and the Coca Cola company wants to come to the uk. You could come up with unbelievably plausible reasons why it's a dumb idea, right? Which is one. A lot of Brits drink a lot of alcohol, so we're perfectly well lubricated, thanks very much. We've got a shit climate. Ice is treated like a luxury Good. We drink tons of tea and coffee, okay? So we're already kept hydrated that way. Frankly, we can't see any market for Coca Cola in the uk, you know, and that would have been perfectly rational, all perfectly sensible. And, you know, so just because you. You can win an argument doesn't mean you're right. Just because what you say makes sense doesn't mean you're right. And I think all my arguments against podcasting were perfectly sensible, but turns out they were completely wrong. Thankfully, thankfully wrong. Then somebody asked the question, what am I most ashamed of? I think, and it's very simple. One of the things I thought was most admirable, it's an age before it was part of a plc. David Ogilvie was flying down to. It might have been Atlanta, actually, I can't remember. He was flying down on a plane to. To pitch to a client. And as they were both going to basically pitch to the same client, David Ogilvie said to the other agency, I don't know which one it was, go on, let's show each other's work. Okay? And David looked at their work and said, that's actually better than our work. And he got on the plane and went straight home. He didn't bother presenting his own work. Okay, now that's mensch behavior. Okay, the second example is I was involved in a pitch to replace the line, the fourth emergency service. And I'm to my eternal. Well, I wasn't in control of the decision. And we have a fiduciary duty to pretend we think we should do this advertising campaign. I really, really Wish David Ogilvy would have refused. Okay. David Ogilvy would have said, that's an act of brandicide. There is no good reason to get rid of such an incredibly valuable property. And interestingly, what was so funny working on this is all the creative department basically couldn't do any work for the first week because they said, we don't understand why we're doing this. We think it's stupid. Okay. And actually, probably, you know, that's one of my great regrets, is that nobody ever had the balls to say, look, let's just walk away from this. Actually would have saved us a fortune because we didn't win the pitch anyway. Okay. But actually, that was one of the examples, you know, where it was just an act of brand vandalism, to be absolutely honest.

John Evans (50:30)

Well, there's one person in the audience I know, wherever Rupert is, who actually founded the agency that came up with that. So big kudos to Rupert, wherever you are. Right, Rory, you've been amazing. Thank you so much. And big round of applause for Rory.

Rory Sutherland (50:43)

Thank you. Oh, thank you.

John Evans (50:47)

Thank you very much for listening or watching Uncensored cmo. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcast. If you're watching, hit subscribe there as well. I'd also love to get a review. Reviews make a big difference on other people discovering the show. So please do leave a review wherever you get your podcast. If you want to contact me, you can do I'm over on x uncensored CMO or on LinkedIn, where I'm under my own name, John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.