Rory Sutherland: Two Way Doors & Being Distinctive

A lot of the time I think our most greatest value we can now is advertising agents is to say, "I'm not sure about this, but it's definitely worth testing." Welcome back to another episode of Black T-shirts. Today's guests need to know introduction. Rory Sutherland, he's a giant of the advertising world and one of the world's leading thinkers in the behavioral science space. His day job is vast chairman of Ogrevie, but he's a renowned speaker and thinker all over the world. Rory's got a big brain, he's got lots of opinions and lots of insights and we could have talked to him for hours. Let's get into it. Welcome to Black T-shirts, Rory Sutherland. Are you wearing a Black T-shirt? No, I'm not. I've completely missed the brief. So I'm going in Ogrevie Red as a back-to-share perversity. I'm sorry about that. Do you ever wear Black T-shirts? No. Virtually never. I think I do have a Black T-shirt. It might have been given to me, but I'm pretty much pro-color in clothing and pattern. There's a lovely cartoon somewhere which says, "Walk down the corridor, turn left and you'll find a place where everybody's dressed the same." That's the creative department. So, Rory, just briefly, do you identify as a creative, you've been a creative, you've started in direct marketing? As a school kid were you creative? Yeah, I think so. I have so many centric family background which helps a lot, actually. And it was a little bit provincial not urban, which I also think helps a bit, actually. But I don't think there's a kind of, I think what makes creative people different. I'm not claiming for a second that people got born creative or that it's impossible to teach it. But I think it does come down to a belief or framing that you can create value somehow through sheer ingenuity rather than necessarily through effort. I think creative people, if you like, I suppose, less creative people think like economists. There's a kind of proportionality, kind of effort and reward. I think creative people kind of think like game theorists. They're always absolutely fascinated by ingenuity, cunning. That's one thing. I have to confess, I was watching various things like Dope's sick recently. The whole documentary about Purdue farmer and the oxy-contin people. Now, just to make clear, I'm not totally a moral, hateful individual. 90% of me watching Dope's sick was going, this is absolutely disgusting. These people have zero kind of morals. They're willingly enriching themselves on the backs of massive human suffering. And 10% of me was going, Jesus, that was kind of clever. Because at the same time, if you like, you had Pablo Escobar who was trying to get drugs into the US. And he was going to all the trouble of having to get the stuff grown in one place, processed in another, hidden in tins in the back of vans, crossing the border from Mexico, driving customers officials all at Hassel. Whereas Purdue farmer just used the existing apparatus of drug distribution to make a fortune completely legally doing exactly the same thing. Rory, I reckon that's an interesting point, because there's one of the new opportunities he comes into the agency. It's really assessed first and foremost by its creative potential, rather than the morals of the industry or is it a good or a bad thing, you know, the ethics of it don't come into the decision quite as much as they arguably should. That comes later. I think it's really important that there, and I think this is one of the biggest mistakes we make, okay, which is what non-created people are doing is they're trying to get everything right first time. And an example I'll give here is I'm just, I think, written a piece saying, are cops better scientists than the scientists. And let me explain, okay, if you're a policeman investigating some murder or crime or whatever it may be, there are actually two phases to your activity, okay. There's the, what you might call the exploratory investigative phase, which involves a hell of a lot of kind of leaps of imagination, hypothesis, anecdote, door to door inquiries, gossip, okay. A lot of the information you're working on in the investigative phase doesn't have any evidential value. You can't present in the court of law. It's just saying, where shall I look next? What might have happened, you know, is it possible that this happened? You know, was this murder a toilet or was it accidental death, okay? Now, eventually, obviously, when you found out to a highly-reve confidence who'd done it, you then have to gather evidence which is presented in the court of law. But in the process of the investigation, you learn all sorts of things, including imagination, okay, to get you to that point and find out who did it. And only then, you say, okay, now we have to gather the evidence. I think it's important that we recognise that there are two phases to this, okay. I don't know how many serial killer documentaries you watch, how many kind of true-life crime things you've watched and so on. But quite often, the breakthrough comes from something extraordinary trivial. I mean, literally, you know, in the case of the Yorkshire Ripper, a very famous British serial killer who they couldn't catch for about 10 years, he was effectively in the Bradford Red Light District. And one of the cops noticed he was kind of parked the wrong way around. I have to explain every time, I'm not really familiar with this, but you, apparently, if you're having sex with a prostitute, you kind of park with your car facing inwards. So nobody can see what's happening on the back seat. And this guy was parked facing the other way around, which is kind of what you do if you wanted to make a quick getaway after killing some. And one of the cops just noticed that was a bit weird, which caused him to then go and investigate a bit further. Now, as I explain you, you can't arrest someone, okay, and you can't bang them up for 30 years on the basis of parking in a funny way, okay, it's not overdentional. It has absolutely no overdentional value, but it's significant. And then I think he's something which we have to understand because what I think they're trying to do in business now is we're trying to start with the data and then just work forwards on the basis of what we absolutely know. And that's like saying, unless it has overdentional value as a cop, I'm not going to pursue it at all. It doesn't matter. Someone just tells me, you know, my husband's acting in a very funny way on Friday nights, okay, well, I can't take that to a court of law, okay, it's not evidence. So I'm not going to respond to that at all. And I think there's something in creative people that understand that there are multiple phases to solving a problem, quite a few of which involve, you know, speculation, leaps of imagination, actually waiting around, being happy and biguously not knowing, you know, waiting for inspiration to strike, created people are comfortable with that. And I think increasingly we have this kind of cultural efficiency which says, no, no, no, we have to start with the data day one and proceed sequentially from there. And therefore, how would you brief a creative team? Because I think that point you're making around, we want the data, we want the knowledge before we're ready to sort of really embark on a, you know, creative exercise. I mean, in your mind, what's a good brief look like? I'm going to absolutely beg up my colleague, Jules Chockley, a brilliant creative director and Ogleby who simply says, bring back the factory tour, okay, and increasingly we're not doing that anymore. I mean, I knew cases years ago where, you know, the briefing process would involve like 10 days on the road investigating the target audience, okay, and increasingly we're trying to streamline everything. And this is another worry about AI, which is that what we'll do is we'll use AI to bypass steps in the process, which are actually valuable in and of themselves. And missing out what Jules calls the factory tour, not obviously if you're selling financial services or something, you don't have to actually, you know, you don't have a factory to tour. But never forget, I mean, I don't know how famous this is in Australia, it's deservedly very famous in the UK, for sprung dirt technique, the BBH work for Audi. That actually came from a factory tour. I think it was Rosie Arnold and John Hegati, sort of schlepping around the Audi factory. And the account people were going, come on, John, come on, we need to be in a meeting in three minutes time. And I think they were both standing in the corner at some old sign leaning up against a wall. And one of them said, what does for sprung dirt technique mean? And they were something poster or sign from like the 1970s or whatever. But leaving time to get lucky, because the thing is creative people are annoying for all kinds of reasons, but they're annoying for a reason. I don't know if you've read or indeed interviewed John Cleese about his book Creativity A Short and Chafel Guide. No, would love to. Okay, well, see what I'm doing. But one of the things that's brilliant there, he's science and research which looked at creative architects versus uncreative architects. And all of them have different working habits, different modes, some of them are very tidy, some of them are very messy, etc, etc. Mostly you can't generalise, but there was one thing they found which was pretty much infallible, which was the uncreative architects kind of started work straight away. And the creative architects dicked around what you might call waiting for inspiration to strike. And one of the creative insights is that there's a degree of kind of luck to this, okay? There isn't a fail-safe process which will get you to your right answer like high school maths. A degree of this is probabilistic, you can increase your chances of getting lucky, but you can't guarantee it. And one of the reasons I think creative people start work late and tend to procrastinate and play fast and loose with deadlines is they know through experience or instinct that there's a kind of fortuitous serendipitous art to this process, okay? And you're much better off waiting for an inspiration to strike because then you are starting work straight away. I don't even know if it's waiting for inspiration. I see creativity has been the connection of you know random things in your head in a new kind of way. Yeah, you know I can't get an idea. It might come to me by luck, but the more the deadline approaches, I just have faith that all the connections are going to come and they normally come late. And so there's no point even staffing on it until I know time is about to run out. And I don't know what that is. That's really interesting. I mean I'll tell you a very funny story about this, okay? So I was talking to someone very creative guy who used to work in something like an actuarial firm. And he was a creative guy in an incredibly kind of rigid environment. And one of his jobs was to write a week the newsletter which went out to their clients. And his boss insisted that he wrote 20% of the newsletter on Monday, 20% of the news day, 20% of the news day, 20% of the news day, so that he had a 100% complete on Friday. And of course we'd both burst out laughing because a lot of people would think well that's perfectly sensible, you know, you don't want to leave it to the last minute, okay? We both got a burst out laughing at the absurdity of this because you know that's a way to write a very boring news chat. Actually you kind of leave it till Thursday. And then as you said some extra you know you know you have five topics you have to write about but you can't think of a single thing that connects all five. And then if you leave it till Thursday maybe you get lucky and you come up with some fantastic theme which enables you to you know kind of put a link between the five disparate things. And we both have kind of laugh because of course to a lot of people that's very sensible kind of time management. That's interesting. Hey, Roy, the irony of all of this of just leaving things to luck and don't try to force the process is your renowned as kind of the behavioral sciences at least at the very least the behavioral sciences mouthpiece for the entire industry for the world and the application of that obviously through Ogleby and so on. What do you know about from all of that that can help creators not just businesses but the creative people tasked with coming up with ideas? What do you know that can really help them in that in that process? Part of the reason I fell in love with the behavioral sciences it does double duty there. Okay, which is first of all it helps you think weird and it helps you contemplate the fact that the opposite of what seems obvious is often true. Okay. Okay, the opposite of a good idea can be another good idea and it helps you actually ask questions which effectively. Okay, one of the things that always bothers me about an over focus on data is that if you want to really have a breakthrough idea. Okay, what you need is the things for which there isn't yet data. Okay, in other words, if you know something that none of your competitors know that is 200 times as valuable as knowing something that are all your competitors know and equally if something's counterintuitive and therefore most people don't want to believe it and you do you do believe it and you act on it that's also 200 times more valuable than doing the obvious in a kind of competitive setting particularly. So first of all it helps you have better ideas and then it does double duty because when you've had a weird idea remember in our game we can't just put it on the canvas and bang in in a gallery we've got to sell the guy my dear to a client and generally obviously at first clients are uncomfortable with things which are non-obvious or counterintuitive or seem instinctively strange and the great thing about behavioral science is it means that there's a whole body of evidence to support the fact. By the way, not that this is this strange thing is true. I think that's a mistake looking for behavioral economic kind of provide you with laws but there are recurring patterns which show evidence of this behavior. Some of my most successful work, this is the kind of thing which what I always say is the broken binoculars are market research and kind of economic logic. They're not totally useless by any means but there are a hell of a lot of things which you'll never learn in market research because consumers don't consciously know them about their own behavior or which are totally unreliable in market research. I'll give an example of that in a moment. And the other thing is kind of economic logic people will people more people will buy at a lower price which is sometimes untrue. Okay, sometimes you need to put your price up. Now it's really really important both that we seek out those ideas and we know how to sell them when the opportunity arises and so behavioral science can do both which I think is really important. I'll give you a perfect example of this. I won't name it yet except not absolutely shorts in the public domain but one of the most successful things we did is just create the rule of three in price. We wanted more people to buy a premium version of something so we created a super premium version of the same thing and since most people defaults to the option in the middle if they can't decide what that meant was what used to be the premium option now became the middle option and look now most people aren't really aware of themselves doing it or wouldn't say what you know in order for you to buy the premium option you need to create needs more expensive ones and also you need some sort of evidence that this is a it doesn't have to be this is what I think behavioral economics sometimes going does not have to be universally true right this isn't physics all right it has to be true enough of the time that it's worth testing and that's probably the third way the behavioral science does really good duty which is introducing a really strong kind of testing culture with randomized control trials because you know I've done this for a long time where I get where you get good is you go I don't know if that's going to work but it's definitely worth trying and you know so that's the third thing I think which is useful from behavioral science which is really really and let's face I started in direct marketing we are pretty good at that already yeah so that's the other thing which is to say I do is to have the confidence to say I don't know if this is true if it is true it would make you a large amount of money testing it doesn't cost very much money at all let's try it that's the third thing we have to cultivate I think yeah I'm amazed at how you in terms of the creative process how you agencies and clients have a test and learn culture or a culture of experimentation and putting things out there and incremental can I tell you a very funny story about this which I only learned at dinner last night talking to someone who worked for sky now fortunately you're in Australia so I don't have to explain who sky is sky TV I was always really really impressed by sky is behavioral science as I thought it was okay I was talking to the guy last night they're sitting with people at sky in terms of pricing in terms of the totalology program etc etc what they do seems to be really well informed by behavioral science and he said you know the weird thing because he he did work at sky and he knew a lot about behavioral science but he said they don't have a behavioral science department what they have is an incredibly strong testing culture and so because they test and they test a lot of things including silly things it's exactly the same effect as having a behavioral science department because everything they do kind of works and I was always intrigued by how good I'll give you an example of what sky does very intelligently okay I spoke to someone at sky once you said on your sophisticated sky box if they wanted to they could roll out five improvements overnight or seven improvements simultaneously overnight but they don't they drip them really really slowly partly to create the impression that things are continually getting better but also because they've learned that if you introduce two improvements simultaneously people get a bit blinded by the headlights they don't use either of them whereas if you introduce little enhancements one at a time people find it cognitively bearable and they are and you get much much higher adoption sooner they have a very very clever approach to kind of introducing innovations and again that emerges not from behavioral science in emerges just you know just for having a really great testing culture. Jeff Bezos and Amazon has this phrase, "A two-way door." And Jeff makes a really important distinction, which I don't think we make an advertising in which we should, which is there are one-way doors, right? That's when you build a massive warehouse somewhere. And once you've built it, it's committed, you're committed, there's no going back. You can't move the warehouse. It's a one-way door. Once you've walked through it, you've walked through that door and you're never gonna go back, okay? And those decisions require a huge amount of rigor and cost-benefit analysis and feasibility studies and all that sort of knowledge, right? But Jeff makes the point, there are a lot of things which are two-way doors. Yet what is cheaper than a triumph than it is to argue about? And interestingly, various things, Amazon Prime and Amazon Web Services, apparently, the business case wasn't very strong for either of them. I'm going back years, okay? There are two most amazing things that Amazon has done that really distinguished them from other online retailers and other businesses, okay? And in both cases, people were arguing to death and going, you know, I'm not really content. And someone, I think possibly Jeff just goes, look, this is a two-way door. Don't argue about it, try it and see what happens. And I think we need, you know, in advertising, we tend to say, okay, we're going to argue really, really strongly the case for doing a whole thing we bloody do, okay? And we're going to, you know, advance this huge right case. Actually, a lot of the times, I think, are most of the greatest value we can now as advertising agencies to say, I'm not sure about this, but it's definitely worth testing. I get that it's useful. I think sometimes it's the economics of what we do that stops people thinking of a two-way door. But in terms of applying what you're doing, imagine you had a really big problem or somebody wanted a creative idea to a big global issue. And I am going to just take, for example, let's say you don't want Trump, for example, to be re-elected. - Can I tell you my dilemma on this, which is, I am so horrified at Biden for not standing down to minimize the chances of a Trump presidency, okay? - Because he's too old. - That, yeah, that I'm almost vote for Trump in spite for, against Biden and the Democratic National Committee for being so absurdly stubborn, okay? - But partly I don't understand why you want to do that at that age anyway. - Okay. - That's a bit, I don't understand. Why, if you've done it once, you've got the Kuros. Why on earth would you want another four years at 80, you've won or whatever? - I've got a bit of family history in this. You're not going to believe this, but my fourth cousin twice removed or something was Woodrow Wilson, who had a massive stroke in his second term. Woodrow Wilson's mum was born in England and he had a massive stroke in the middle of his second term, basically his wife ran the White House. Apparently she did quite a good job. So maybe you should be asking what's Mrs. Biden? (laughing) - So imagine there's a creative, and it's been tasked with making sure that Trump doesn't get into the White House, and you've got all of your knowledge, what would you feed that creative person? - There is actually a creative suggestion there, and I can't remember who made it, but it's some sort of billionaire on a podcast which is why don't we just offer Trump $3 billion not to run? - To not to run. - Yeah, no, yeah. - Okay, he's a businessman, he's a very rich, he's a very rich guy. - Yep, and actually that's not inconceivable that that might work. - What I find interesting about behavioral sciences is there's so much to know, and there's so many bits of it, and the frameworks that keep all of behavioral science together aren't that strong. How do you decide what's useful in the whole world of behavioral sciences to give those people? - Your fellow Australian Sam Tateum, who's a colleague of mine, has written a brilliant book called Evolutionary Eye Gaze. - Amazing book, okay. - Yeah, so I don't know if you've had him on, you must invite him on, because, and so actually, this is not me, but I spoke at your ask, I find Australian intellectual life, actually incredibly interesting. You're always inviting me over because you want to bridge for your conference. And I kind of go, have you met Nick Groen in Melbourne, you know, the economist? - Yeah, he's great. - He's, or Steve Keen, right? You know, you're actually producing, I always joke, it's like Australian former, right? Which is that because you kind of evolve a bit in isolation, you produce more interesting animals, plants, and thinkers than people who are kind of in the middle of some sort of large, great needs. - Then they will all kill you. - Yeah, I thought, and so much. - No, I have to tell you by the way, total thing, but it's one of my favorite stories about fucking up, not understanding context, which is the episode of Pepper Pig called Mr. Skinny Lens, okay, in which George hides a spider in Pepper's bed, in the bed of her doll's house, okay. And Pepper gets very frightened by the spider, the whole thing's produced in the UK obviously. And Daddy Pig seeks to reassure Pepper with the phrase, don't worry Pepper, spiders are very small and can't possibly hurt you. And the episode went out unedited in Australia. So there's a generation of Australian parents going, you can't tell them that. - Okay. - Very funny. - But no, it's, it's, but the genuinely, I envy Australian kind of intellectual life in many ways, because, you know, so with evolutionary ideas, Pablo Ries and I'm conservative is, okay, I'll quote it very nicely, which was writing in defense of an Ogle the Hand campaign, the columnist, Caitlin Moran in the Times, quoted, which I think is very true, a piece of graffiti, she once saw in Brighton, and the piece of graffiti says, "Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can." Right? Now, it's both a sort of silly bit of graffiti and it's one of the most profound kind of conservative statements in a sense, okay? Which is, you can't rewrite history, you have to start where you are, you have to start with the adjacent possible, you have to, again, start where you are, use what you have, do what you can. And that's how most progress have to happen. And I'm naturally suspicious of attempts to, what you might call redesign reality from scratch, because there's so much hidden intelligence and evolutionary processes that redesigning society from scratch is a kind of active, complete, absurd hubris. So many of the systems and norms and things in place have actually evolved over time. And if you, the famous phrase evolution is cleverer than everybody. Yeah. So I do believe in evolutionary progress, which is why I'm actually a bit conservative. Sorry. But to get back to the original part, there's a problem in social media, which is that it's difficult to express moderate opinion. So try this, you like. Go on Twitter, go on Twitter, and actually express an opinion which says, on the one hand, this, but on the other hand, that, you may not know here's Morgan, this kind of controversial, but very brilliant broadcaster. And I just jokingly tweeted, I find Piers Morgan very entertaining and small doses. Or I like some of what Jordan Peterson says. And if you post those things, what's interesting about it on Twitter is not only that, of course, it gets absolutely no traction at all, right? No one retweets it, no one likes it, OK? But also, you feel ridiculous while you're doing it. So if you're on Twitter, you actually type something, which is on the one hand, this, but on the other hand, that, I think Jordan Peterson is right about some things wrong about us. It's actually painful typing that. OK? What would be done when we've created a medium where naturally, it feels comfortable to effectively type abuse, or absurd over generalizations, but it feels really uncomfortable typing something, which is, and I'm definitely just like Karl Marx. Jordan Peterson is kind of right about that, but it's a really interesting diagnosis. When we're presenting ideas, we encourage our people to not use absolute language, because if we use absolute language, then you can be proven wrong much quicker because speaking absolute, but the rule doesn't seem to apply on social media, where it's happening a lot that people speak an absolute language and have a very, very extreme point of view. And then that's kind of suppressing freedom of thought or exploring ideas. Well, also, I describe myself once as the most left-wing person on the alt-right, in the sense that you've actually got a fight to maintain moderate opinion, which is going to be, and you know, the Midas touch was where everything turned into gold. And I don't know what the name for this is, but there's a kind of, you know, you could call it the zuckerman touch, OK, is that you turn everything into malmite. You turn everything into things which people either love or hate. And I did say, you know, if you lean right or lean left, you've got actually put in real work to stop yourself becoming over-invested in a position. Because life's probabilistic, right? This is what my point is that advertising doesn't work on lots of people, right? It works at the margins. It works on the adjacent possible. And it works over time because the adjacent possible gets bigger and bigger, fame compounds. You know, it's a bit like my pension, where, for the first 15 years, I had a pension. I don't know why I'm paying into this fucking thing. Nothing's happening. And then suddenly at the age of 50, you go, where did all this fucking money come from? Right? You know, and things like that. And you're just going to advertise it as being-- Getting right. You ever kind of-- not right, not right, right, right, right. - Right, yeah. I felt like, if that's also true of the pair, I had a great uncle who said, "The trouble with pairs is," he said, "You have to get up in the middle of the night "to eat a pair." Because the pair goes from being rock hard to sludgy, is about three hours, you know? Three hours of perfection. - See, the worst is strides. - They're much nicer than apples. - Yeah, they're much nicer than apples. The pair problem is a texture problem, not a taste problem. - So back to social media, do you find out a suppressing of culture? Do you find there's a normalization happening where people are not expressing ideas and therefore things are getting boring? - Yeah, yeah, I doubtfully. And also, you know, one of the other things I worry about genuinely, okay, is I think clients are hugely reluctant to advertise because, you know, there aren't that many things in the modern organization which can cost you your job, but unwittingly finding yourself at the center of a social media storm is one of them. You know, actually, if your advertising campaign doesn't work, and by the way, most advertising campaigns work, creative ones just work better. And we forget to say that. I think creative people have made a slight mistake which they go, unless you're creating, unless you're advertising creative, really creative, it's shit, right? That's actually not true. - That's right. - Point-ball advertising. Quite bad advertising works quite well because fame's very a very valuable thing to add. In fact, very bad advertising sometimes works very well because it requires kind of cult following. And so, I think we've got to be really careful to create your people. What we're looking for is a multiplier here. It's not the difference between success and failure. It's just the difference between being quite successful and really, really successful. And I do really worry that actually putting ahead above the parapert is becoming a really dangerous thing for a brand to do, because they're so terrified of a social media backlash where people basically go, look, the safest thing is either to mean to do nothing or just to do performance marketing, the load of ads that go safe 20% if you buy now. Two days ago, and I can't remember what it was, but I noticed a really interesting ad on the internet. Okay, now three of that significant is, literally, I probably hadn't seen a banner ad that looked like someone had actually given it three weeks thought for the previous two years. An ad which may be go, "Woof, what the germs will stop effect," which is an English phrase we don't use in English, but it's like handy for mobile phone. And Germans talk about the phrase, "I'm stop effect," which is the part of an ad that makes you kind of do a double take. It's actually pretty good phrase. We all do introducing into English, I'm just gonna mean. But I was kind of intrigued because you suddenly realize part of this isn't driven by the fact that creativity doesn't work. It's the fact that creativity's kind of becoming frightening. In the 80s, all the brands that did slightly brave, slightly, you know, rawnsy work, you can't, are people too frightened to do sexy seriously? But then, but then you look at a brand, Rory, like liquid death, right? In the States. And I think it's a really interesting example of a brand that is unashamedly, happy to sort of really offend a lot of people. And it's got to be a death on the can. What he thought's on that, a brand like that. Like, it's growing incredibly fast. It sort of does a very, very interesting. First of all, we shouldn't forget, by the way, in terms of taste and perception, the high-lissing little thing that was a very early water in a can. - Yeah. - So it's not all the branding thing. It's also the experiential behavioral science. Now, weirdly, I don't like drinking bottle water out of plastic bottles. Whereas I actually, so, you know, my dad, who's 93, claims that he's never drunk of water in his life. But this weekend, he's not an alcoholic. He just drinks a lot of tea and coffee, okay? I'm just talking to him, I want to make that clear. And I don't drink much water, unflaven water. I find really boring, okay? But weirdly, I'd quite like drinking water in a can. And so, the part of it was that. We've got to remember it was really innovative packaging and then the package design was fantastic and definitely had a stop effect. And it's going to be polarizing, you know, you're probably not going to get people serving it for their next dinner party. But on the other hand, it re-contextualizes something. I was talking to a large food plant the other day, right? Now, I know people laugh at me for being obsessed with air friars. Okay. But in fairness, I was there first. I was the John the Baptist of fucking air friars, right? Okay. And actually, it was fundamentally tip-tock, which I think led to their complete explosion. But I said to the very large food plant, I said, look, take a failed brand, re-lawn shit as an air friar food. Right? And obviously, pick something that's appropriate for being air friars. So it's just like chocolate on. - Lord, right? Okay. But I said, change something that air friars well, take a brand that's not doing very well, but air friaready or whatever it might be on the packaging and turn the brand into an air friar brand. You don't have to change your product at all. Just see what happens because you can literally achieve this what I call alchemy in the book, which is you can actually turn failure into success by just flipping the context a tiny bit. And that's by the way, another annoying attribute of creatives, which is they don't have a sense of proportion, right? So created people procrastinate, they don't have a sense of proportion. In other words, they get obsessed with weird sign the saying force for a dirt technique when they're supposed to be in an important meeting. And what you realize is a lot of the attributes which make created people really irritating to people who are really kind of reductionist and linear. Okay? They're not being will-inlying, they're there for a reason because small things make a huge difference. Okay? And therefore having a sense of proportion is actually dangerous if you're a creative person. - Marie, I want to go sort of right back. We try to start talking about your upbringing and you know, you went to Cambridge. And I feel like there's a time in English advertising where all the top people went to Oxford or Cambridge. I might be generalizing, but. - No, no, no. One of the reasons I really like advertising is you probably want a few chin stroking oxbridge types in your agency. - Yeah. - Well, but if you can, if you construct an agency exclusively from those people, it will be a fucking disaster. - Yeah. - Well, that one, I'm really, yeah, I'm really grateful I didn't end up working in a law firm where everybody was not scratch graduates. - Yeah. - Well, because instead of complementarity, you get hypercompetition. And advertising was less so now, I think, but was kind of genuinely meritocratic. Now, I say that meritocratic with a lot of luck. But what I mean is you could go from the post room to the board room. - Yeah. - Back then, yeah. Okay. And various people like Peter Meade did exactly that. Okay. And I think we must absolutely fight to preserve that. So don't get me wrong. I mean, you know, Paul Feldwick, the, I think the greatest planner of all time, although there might be something to debate about that. Finally, it went to the same school as me. We didn't overlap. But we both read the same library copy of the Hidden Persuaders, which kind of persuaded both of us to go into advertising. You know, he's undoubtedly, you know, a mega intellectual on the side, right? And yeah, and practically you want those people kicking around, but you also want the, you know, it's what you might call the Beethoven Mozart divide, you know, Beethoven worked very hard to produce music, thinking about it. You also want to let a Mozart's kicking around who can do it without really understanding why. And I've worked with a few of those as well. And, you know, they're better than me, actually. I might be better at selling it 'cause I've actually actually explained how I got there. But actually, you know, it's that Beethoven Mozart saliery divide that you need to really preserve. - Well, and do you, so do you, do you think there's a role for them? And do you think there's a role? What, what impact do you reckon planners have had on the industry? - So before planners were there, - Righty. - The, well, the creatives were the planners in the sense. Now, not in the sense of like looking at detailed sales data or kind of, you know, interrogating the whole thing. But I think it was someone like Dave Trot who said, "I kind of resent planning because you took away the most important part of my job." Which wasn't actually producing the ad. It was the process that led there. And I think the effect has been mixed. If I'm honest about it, I think planning and creative should work as a three person creative team, if you like. And actually, it's only this nonsensical pretence linear process, which all advertising agencies use a dear to you, okay. Which makes that impossible. Howl Henry did actually read, I don't know if you remember, Howl Henry, Choldecott, Lurie, back in the '90s, which was the kind of, you were either a bit of a BbHite or a Howl Henryite if you're an advertising in the '90s. And the direct marketers, which I was, and I still am, tended to be Howl Henryites, okay. But they actually had the kind of five person creative team where I think the fifth person was the client. And they believed in actually doing the working in parallel, not working in the series. And I still think they're fundamentally right. It's a bit more expensive to do that way. But nonetheless, and also procurement would probably have issues with it. And Rory, what about you? I don't understand why I'm paying for a creative person before the brief has been written. That would be the pre-armant argument. I think that's actually, but by the way, I think you should just go along, take a client brief to a creative team as soon as you get in and just go, just think about this shit, okay. Because it might be that the best idea comes from a whole process of investigation and inquiry and trans spotting. It might just be that someone goes, I just do this. I can remember that. That's right. first time I gave the creators in a previous agency, the client brief. And I said, "Here's the client brief. It's really good. Go away and do that." And I said, "But what's your role?" And I said, "Honestly, I'm not that sure, because I don't really think I've got one here." Well, you crack it. And the other way to go is we spoke to Andre Toledo from David, which is part of your world glory. And he talked about the idea that we're always briefed. We understand the key killers of the brand. We understand the key challenges of the brand. So we're briefed. And we're just thinking of ideas. It's something happening in culture that sparks an idea. I think that's a really nice idea too. Like, why do we wait for this piece of paper before we start? We have to show our piece of paper. And it's fucking ridiculous. We have another courage to say, "We're good, because we have better people." Right? That's why we're good. We have to pretend that the process is our secret source and that it's infinitely reputable. And what most agencies do, the process and Paul Feldwick wrote a fantastic piece about this. The story we tell about how we got to where we got to as creative people is nearly always a post-rationalisation. It's reverse-engineered after the event. That's not to say that, but that is not to say that you just take a brief and randomly fly with it. But an experience creative has mental checklists. You could look at Brian E. No's thing, oblique strategies. Make it big, make it small, set in the future, set in the past. There's kind of checklists they go through. Keep the product, change the context. Turn a weakness into a strength. We're number two, so we try harder. Good things come to those who wait. Reassuringly expensive. There's a creative checklist which Brian E. No got there with oblique strategies. Interesting overlap between what we do and music production. Obviously, Rick Rubin. There's a lot of similarity between our worlds. Brian E. No will get people to swap instruments and stuff like that. Just for the lulls, but sometimes it pain off. What we did with Ogleby, Doug was a huge success, fantastic bit of work. It was messy. We got there through all manner of messy means. What we had to do in reverse is we do what all agencies do. We take our most famous bit of work. We reverse-engineer the process and pretend that we've discovered the mother load. This is a secret to everything. It's all about purpose. It's all about this. You understand what we do in terms of a sales spiel and a stick to use two Yiddishism. I get it. It's a good spiel. It's a good stick. It's not true. Good agencies produce better work because they've got better people and better culture. The culture is often very, very loose. This urge to impose a straight jacket. Just to be really clear, in behavioural science, we don't really have a methodology or a rule. I do believe in checklists. There's actually a book called The Checklist Manifesto by Atal Nguyen Di, which is the value of checklists in everything from aviation to medicine and so on. Have we thought about this? Mindspace, which is a behavioural science framework, messenger incentives, norms, defaults, social proof. I think it is. Anyway, okay. Mindspace is actually a mnemonic. Charlie can buy that. He worked on it for a year without realising it was a mnemonic. I can only think of spell out mindspace after a year. But that's really good because you go, everybody assumes that everybody assumes that the person talking in the ad is going to be the brand. But messenger makes you think, well, what if you got someone totally different to talk about this? Okay. What if you got a celebrity? I'm following up. It was years later, I was briefed by someone to prevent music piracy and we spent ages struggling about, you know, how could the music industry do an ad saying, this is back in the early 2000s? How can the music industry do an ad saying, don't pirate our music? Because if you do, you know, Brittany might not be able to afford a second mansion. It's not a very strong message. I've only years later, too late actually, that the inspiration of struck looking at the mindspace framework, which is don't get music magazines, telling people not to pirate music, get computer magazines and IT magazines to say, this is stupid because you could get a virus, you can buy Spotify for 15 quid a month. What are you complaining about, right? Actually, what we realised that the advice was coming from the music industry, which seems self-interested, whereas if the advice had come from your monthly copy of stuff or T3 or computer magazines or from, okay, then it would have a far higher degree of credibility because it wasn't just pure naked self-interest. But to check this, I really believe in, but this, I mean, for Curement insist we have a process because they need to know what they're paying for. But actually, if you read Paul Feldwick's account of how the great Bokty-Karb campaign with Rowan Atkinson came about, the whole process was entirely chaotic. It was absolutely non-linear, it was recursive, involved huge numbers of false starts. It's exactly like that investigative process in detective work, which is bringing my conversation full, okay, the evidential part of detective work, the proving the proving who done it, okay, is actually a rigorous process. That's the evidential part. But the investigative part is not linear. It involves false starts, the ability to keep an open mind for much longer than you're comfortable with, or most people are comfortable with. It's not actually a process. There are checklists, obviously, you do door to door inquiries, you swob for prints, you swob for DNA, you do all that sort of stuff. But there isn't actually an absolutely linear process. Levi Bellfield was caught, as I said, because an ex-girlfriend of his phoned up the police and said, "When I was living with Levi, I discovered a copy of one of my women's magazines, and he'd stabbed out all the faces of blonde women, only blonde women, with a biro, and all his victim was tended to be blonde, okay?" Now, you can't send someone to jail for life for defacing a cop. I'd say, I don't know why she stayed with him. For me, that would have been a bit of a deal, right? If I ever come back and find a copy of a newspaper, my wife's the face is out of any Welsh people in the newspaper, I think that's going to be time when I start moving out. But she did stay with him for a bit. But nonetheless, again, it has no evidential value, but it tells you what to investigate. And that's what I mean. And I think what we're trying to do in the kind of data-driven world is we're trying to start with facts and move forwards on the basis of what is already known. And we're missing out this phase of effectively really open investigation. In other words, we're trying, we're trying, we're saying, imagine a police investigation where you say, "I will not act on any information which I cannot present in court." You've never catch the bugger. It involves leaps of imagination, what ifs, gossip, anecdotes. Isn't it where that guy's parked that way around? We often talk about evidence-based creativity, but we don't care if the evidence comes before or after the creativity. As long as the two things link where we're kind of happy is how we describe it. By the way, I think a lot of ads work for completely different reasons for the ones that were intended at the time of this creation. Absolutely. I think there's an awful lot of that, which is in a sense, you've found the right answer to the wrong question, something, in some cases. Well, I think we obsess with being right where it's just more important to be interesting, isn't it? You know, in a mean like I just think this idea of trying to find a right answer is and we obsess with messaging. Yeah. And it's just the vibe of a thing that works, not necessarily the actual message. Hey, Rory, we went out for dinner once and at dinner, there was two Nobel laureates, Daniel Cain, no, no, Richard Taylor and. It was Richard Taylor. And Kramer was. Karama Kramer. Some. Oh, yeah. I'm sure you're right. Anyway, that's right. So you have been a massive advocate for behavioral economics and have kind of popularised that within the world of advertising. One of the things we do on the show is we introduce a segment called the pub test where we take our guests work into the pub test and we ask them if they think it's bullshit or not. With you, we wanted to take the whole world of behavioral economics and put it to the pub test. So what we did is earlier today, we went down to the pub and we explained behavioral economics to a whole bunch of people and got their reactions. This is how we explained it. We wanted to keep it as simple as possible. So that's when to Wikipedia. And this is what we told them. Behavioral economics is the study of a psychological cognitive emotional, cultural and social factors involved in the decisions of individuals or institutions and how these decisions deviate from those implied by a classical economic theory. Behavioral economics is primarily concerned with the bounds of rationality of economic agents. That is, looking at the limitations and influences on our decision making ability. So that makes sense to you and I, right? That's cool. Rock on. Let's put that to the pub test and see what they said. This is - She's gonna be peasy. - Yeah, pretty much makes sense to me. The first part definitely the second part gets a little fancy with the words, but you're pretty much doing sense. To put it in my own words, I would say that it's all decisions we make are influenced by the things around us. - Basically taking into the human factor of economic decision making. - It makes sense. It's quite like tortoise, like a lot of words, big words. - I had too many beers for this one. It would be understanding your consumer and the audience and how they interact with the world around them and then using that to create a campaign to that, that challenges that or flex that or makes more exciting. - How could be useful in marketing? Understanding people's decision making process can help marketers prepare, influence how they market a product or how they get people to want to purchase something. - Useful in marketing. - I mean, it influences all of our marketing. It's me, it's the kind of boil things down to a strategic decision making that's also always a human element to it. - Well presumably if you can understand how people think and what influences they behave, you can understand how to market to them. - Consumers react better to having like scientific information. So you could say this study shows or doctors say and people are like that regardless of if they know what the study is or even if it's real. - Oh, like I think it was ages ago, you buy codec city campaign that challenged the way that B-Mail hygiene was used in marketing. Like it's in like for so long the way they marketed like pads and tampons were a certain way that didn't actually reflect how people actually used an experience them. So it flipped it on its head and made it show that the realistic side of things in people actually used them to sell them better. - Any kind of advertising if you think about even like a beer ad, if you think about emotional cultural and social factors involves in the decisions so why people drink. What influences their drinking, socially and culturally and then using that to influence them. - I don't think a pass is a problem to us. No, I'm still confused by it but I think I have it. Like I'm not sure if my answer is correct but I think that could be. - I think it does. - Yeah, I think this does pass the pub test. I think that if it's simplified to its core in that if it's these, I think these theories are quite easy to understand if you simplify them. - Not really. - So we hadn't heard that before. I'm pretty surprised a pretty intelligent pub. - I'm amazing. Clear the pub question. - Yeah, I thought, yeah, but that's what I'm saying. I said Australian intellectual life. I'm based in London and I kind of envy it. - Yeah, yeah. - A genuine, do you think there's a kind of a mind in this there? I'd say the same about Canada actually. I'd much rather work in Canada than the United States. - It's much nicer. Do you think, do you think behaviour economics and behaviour sciences has made a dent in how he do advertising? Or do you think it's just re-package what we know anyway? - Well, first of all, okay. I think it'll be, actually he's a key wee. So I've got to be careful. But a bar and shop, if it makes you distinctive, it can't hurt. Right? And there's that great argument about differentiation versus distinctiveness. And bar and shop yet another antipody and great thing. You've got Mark Ritz and Dan in Tasmania at the moment, okay? I'm feeling left out, frankly. The only reason Australians go to Europe is FOMO. There's no rational reason to go there. Other than the fear of missing out. You know, feeling a bit isolated. I said, you know, lifestyle reasons at all. Shit, yeah. (laughing) The, I mean, if Australia were like three hours flight from the UK, I mean, you've got to really worry about like hypersonic flight, okay? 'Cause you'll have 60 million Brits down there all the time. (laughing) If you think it's bad now, imagine what that's going to be like. - Yeah. Apparently they know how to make the planes faster already. They're just not launching them. - Yeah, keeping in mind. - Keeping them bad. But bar and shop would make the point that actually differentiation can be dangerous whereas distinctiveness always pays. Now, Ritz and has a slightly argument. I agree with Ritz and that it kind of depends, okay? And that obviously differentiation can be valuable in certain circumstances. But there is the point that, you know, if this is just a new, look, if all this provides is a new way of looking at things, then it's a win, okay? You know, we don't have to set the bar at the level of kind of Nobel Prize winning academic papers here where we have a p-value of 0.01. If it actually provides an opportunity in a window for people to have different conversations that they wouldn't know otherwise have had, you know? Then I consider it a complete win. Now, I think it's actually more important than that. I think it has value in selling interesting ideas. It has value in, I think the whole question of differentiation is really, really important though. Because what management consulting firms do is they impose the same kind of methodology on all their clients in a sector. You make all the businesses more and more alike. When you make the businesses appear more and more alike, you create hypercompetition. In other words, you decrease the value and the marketplace because everybody's effectively competing for the same sweet spot. If you promote distinctiveness and to a degree differentiation, but I kind of agree with Byron that actually the distinctiveness is the first stage. And if you want, you can have a bit of differentiation. We tend to, we tend to regard it as, unless we are differentiated, we cannot possibly be distinct. Well, I mean, tell that to log in, bros, right? OK, absolute bullshit. Nobody can tell the difference in blind tastes. It's the distinctiveness, which is the differentiation. And if we create greater diversity in the marketplace by catering to different people at different times and different needs, there's a huge benefit to that, which I don't think anybody ever talks about, which is that if you're a efficiency centric as a business, you become more and more alike to your competitors. The whole category becomes more and more similar. So effectively, you're just eating each other's lunch. It's a zero-sum game. If you create differentiation, that emerges from a kind of philosophy of growth, not a philosophy of scarcity and efficiency. You create complementarity in the marketplace, which grows the categories of hope, OK? Some people want posh expensive stuff, some people want frozen stuff, some people want to brand that's fun, some people want to brand that's serious. Something really important is going on here, which is if you're efficiency focused, you just listen to McKinsey, what you create is actually fragility. There's no resilience, OK? Because what you've done is it's a bit like everything we make comes from China and we've got one supply chain. It's the same thing as that, only downstream. We're all seeking the same customers. We're all chasing them in the exact same way and we're all doing the same thing. If your customer focus rather than efficiency focused and therefore you diversify your offering, the byproduct of that is actually resilience. Now, no one actually gets rewarded for resilience because it's a long-term thing and it only proves its value. But economically, it's really, really important. So it's the difference between having a monoculture like all bananas are genetically identical, I think, OK? It's a difference in evolutionary terms to cite your compatriots and tatum, OK? Between being a monoculture and having real biodiversity. So it's customer centricity which drives biodiversity and resilience and indeed long-term progress in a market. Efficiency focus actually drives absolutely opposite. And actually, nature does not optimize for optimality. It optimizes for resilience, for survival and resilience. That's why we have sex, right? Because the most efficient way to replicate all our DNA is simply for a little me to suddenly appear on my left shoulder. And an identical person to then be produced by me. The reason you have sex is because you actually want your DNA to be jiggling around in lots of different carriers to maximize its chance of making it to 50 or 100 years' time. And so I think there's this huge danger that when businesses are customer focused and consumer focused and they see competition or something that happens on the shelf, they become more and more different and add and economic and indeed emotional and the hedonic value to a category. When you optimize around efficiency, actually, the opposite happens. But I think resilience is unintended consequence of customer centricity. So if you're OK, I'll put it in that. When we have the pandemic, right? None of those supermarkets wanted to do online delivery. They didn't want to do click and collect. They just did it because they had to because they realized that if someone comes along and does online delivery really well, we could lose 15% of our best customers, which would be catastrophic. So we'd better off it ourselves. They were doing that grudgingly. They were doing it basically for customer reasons, not for efficiency reasons. The most efficient way in the cell shit is to get people to come into your shop, right? OK. They weren't doing it for efficiency reasons. They were focused on their customers. Then suddenly a pandemic strikes. And the fact that they now have the ability to sell shit online is no longer a kind of defensive customer focus strategy. It's actually completely central to their survival for two years. I think that's a really interesting aspect, which I don't think economists have picked up on, because economists tend to be efficiency, short term efficiency thinkers, not long-term evolutionary systems thinkers. Rory, in terms of not to being, I'm not an efficiency thinker and I'm not a linear person and I live and thrive in chaos and I think from there I often have been fortunate to be around, fortunate enough to be around the whole lot of different kind of creative ideas and the agencies kind of doing well I think partly at least due to some of the chaos that we create. So the main thing you create, so what I was going to say was in terms of having a non-linear approach to your life, I think that's incredibly been exemplified by this podcast where keeping you on a linear narrative is not impossible and I reckon you outdo anyone in terms of freedom of thought and where you, where you, where you, where you, in my defence I occasionally loop back. Oh no, no, no, you do, but that's not, I'm not going to say that linear, that's not, that's not, it can't say circular, it is linking back but it's not linear and that's still lovely because he's still breaking that whole, that whole narrative. I'm engaged in a lifetime fight with account people who the, the thing that really annoys me is like the meeting about the meeting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So before you've had the meeting you've decided the direction in which the meeting goes. I know. If you're trying to execute, you do want that. Have a meeting with no agenda. Brent just told me before this podcast he was, he was slacking off his colleagues about having a meeting before the meeting, then the meeting, then a post meeting meeting. And so it's kind of funny. But by the way, by the way, one thing we can fight worldwide and we have to fight it all the time. Okay. So, the thing that we have to do is we have to fight it all the time. So, we have to fight it all the time. [Music]