The old phrase ‘fake it until you make it’ might have a place in advertising. Well, kind of. One of adland’s great thinkers and Ogilvy’s UK vice chairman, Rory Sutherland, believes that great thinking and work is less about a rational, logical process and more a matter of trial and error.
“I’m going to start with a confession. Every single advertising agency you’ll talk to will pretend there’s a thing called the process. There isn’t. It’s complete bollocks,” Sutherland said at yesterday’s Marketing Association of Australia’s RESET conference.
“In effect, what you do is you talk shit until you get lucky. The reason we have to pretend there’s a process is because procurement would go batshit insane if they thought there were a single second of anybody’s time which wasn’t directly accounted for in the pursuit of some direct objective.
“It’s absolute shit. Nearly everything important that happened to you in your life happened through a mixture of experimentation or accident or imagination.
“Very little has happened as a process of direct, intentional logic based on pre-existing data.”
Decisions driven by data are based on past data, and not future data, which leads to a mindset of “defending what you did last time” rather than doing something differently (and better) in the future.
Sutherland is an advocate of getting a group of different minds together to “talk shit in different ways”, arguing that neurodivergence is a feature of humanity that should be celebrated, not “a bug”.
Is finance killing creativity?
In an entertaining and thought-provoking keynote, Sutherland took aim at the growing influence of finance on the advertising industry.
“The second you hand anything to finance, you’ll end up with cost cutting in some shape or form, and you’ll also end up with twice as many finance people for some reason because their enthusiasm for reducing headcount never actually applies to themselves,” he said.
“You go to any WPP agency now and see the finance department, you can see the fucking curvature of the Earth.
“What we’ve done is we’ve given primacy to the finance people. Once you do that, the scope for imagination further down is massively contained. It’s a huge opportunity cost.”
Sutherland said that it is easier to get fired for being “irrational” than it is for being “unimaginative”, and that creatives always have to present their ideas to finance departments for approval, but “it never fucken happens the other way”.
The problem is not that finance people don’t add value; it’s that finance teams frame success differently to what might be in the best interests of an agency or client brief, and that no single group of people with the same mental model should make decisions in isolation.
“When was it agreed that finance got to own the metrics? The only thing finance can measure is value as expressed in immediate financial transactional value. That’s about 30 per cent of all value that can exist in the marketplace,” he said.
‘A race to the bottom’
Every brand should have three of four measures of success that are unique and helps the business differentiate itself from competitors. Even worse, he argues, is allowing tech platforms to determine the marketing metrics of success.
“If you have the same metrics as everybody else, you end up with homogeneity. One of the disasters of the shareholder value movement is that all companies that pursue shareholder value look like all the other companies that pursue shareholder value, and you end up with a race to the bottom,” he said.
Another problem is that marketing departments have become subordinate to finance and procurement teams who “claim the credit for any penny of cost saving, but are never held responsible for any value they destroy”.
“Marketing has the opposite problem. You’re held responsible for every penny of cost, but you only get to lay claim to maybe a small percentage of the upside,” he said.
An example that he uses stems from Australia. In 2013, Coca-Cola launched its Share A Coke campaign, which labelled cans and bottles with 150 of Australia’s most popular names.
The campaign, by Ogilvy Sydney, now runs in 80 markets and helped turn around an 11-year consumption decline in the US.
Sutherland points out the campaign made Coca-Cola more than $1 billion, but Ogilvy only made a profit of around $350,000 for the idea.
“You don’t get enough money to buy a crap flat in a shit part of Sydney,” Sutherland points out. (B&T found 10 rather ropey studio apartments in Ultimo for less than that price).
“Marketers have been put in this position of subordination to finance people, where they’re held responsible for all the costs, but when you get a fat-tailed outlier success, who’s claiming the credit for that no.
“No one says to marketing, ‘here’s £5 million because you had a good idea last year. Go and spend it in an interesting way.”
A 70-20-10 rule for creative
Sutherland was joined on stage by Nestlé Oceania director of marketing an communications Anneliese Douglass, who asked for some practical takeaways.
In an ideal world, Sutherland would like marketers to give advertising agencies a proportion of their creative budget for planners and creatives to experiment and spend as they choose.
“Some of the most brilliant ideas in the history of the world are an answer to a question that no one’s actually thought to ask,” he said.
Sutherland wants marketers to adopt a 70-20-10 rule often used in media planning, whereby 70 per cent of the budget is allocated to what already works, 20 per cent to promising bets and 10 per cent to true experiments.
“I think the same thing should apply to creativity because if we’re not careful, we’ll turn marketing into an operational efficiency game with effectively a law of diminishing returns,” he said.
He left the audience with a clear view about the importance of neurodivergent thinking, marketing owning its own measures of success, and releasing the finance and procurement imposed shackles that curtail creativity.
“It’s better to be different than it is to be better,” he said. “Dream first and then post-rationalise.
“That’s how you reset. You change the order in which you address problems and the nature of the people who get to define and frame those problems first.”
