Rory Sutherland is a giant of the ad industry. The self-defined “Fat bloke at Ogilvy” brought the house down with his must-watch TED Talk, Life Lessons from an Ad Man. His particular focus in advertising is the importance of applying lessons from behavioural economics, the science behind “how people actually make decisions rather than how the classic economic models say they make them.” It’s a field of research that Australians lag behind in, according to some.
Alex Campbell, strategist with STW’s Lawrence Creative Strategy, was lucky enough to sit down for a long chinwag with Rory in Shanghai. What follows is Part One of their wide ranging discussion about behavioural economics, electronic cigarettes and the discipline of planning; Part Two will be posted tomorrow.
As president of the IPA, you’ve been a strong advocate for behavioural economics. What’s the most ingenious use of it that you’ve seen in advertising?
I’m very pleased with Colenso BBDO in New Zealand, who took that suggestion of mine at TED that someone should create an impulse savings account. While you have a million opportunities to spend, this makes it easy for you to put five or ten dollars into a savings account whenever you’re in the mood.
I’ve never been to New Zealand or Australia, but I find them both very interesting in terms of their approach to innovation because they seem to do the innovations that everyone else is talking about.
I think it may be partly a sense of isolation -- which is that you’re convinced the rest of the world is far more advanced than it really is and so you overcompensate. That consciousness of isolation can have some really healthy effects.
What advice would you have for advertising people trying to apply behavioural economics to our work?
The great problem is that briefs are often written in attitudinal terms -- what some people refer to as an intermediate objective. But I think every brief should have a business or behavioural objective.
There are several reasons for that. The IPA data bank [shows that] briefs that include a behavioural objective are more successful in their business effects than briefs that are given with some sort of intermediate attitudinal objective.
We overstate the importance of attitudinal change as a precursor to behavioural change.
There’s another advantage of course, which is that a behavioural change brief is by definition media, channel and solution neutral. Whereas an attitudinal brief will automatically prompt you to do something on television which addresses attitude.
It hasn’t been helped actually by the fact that clients have started to do half of the agency’s job. So quite often clients come to us with an intermediate objective -- and a very prescriptive brief -- and what then happens is that this problem gets doubled.
At this stage of the interview, [Ogilvy PR worldwide CEO] Christopher Graves and [Ogilvy & Mather Asia Pacific CEO] Paul Heath walk up to say hello to Rory. Chris notices Rory’s electronic cigarette and exclaims “THAT’S WILD.”
The general view is that smoking electronic cigarettes is 80% of the pleasure, 3% of the risk. I’ll take the odds. About a third of people use them to give up, because the behavioural replication is a bit like heroin addicts injecting themselves with biro ink. They’re addicted to the action. About a third of the people just switch over to these completely and keep on going, and about a third smoke three real cigarettes a day and then use this the rest of the time.
How do you feel now about Planning as a discipline, looking back over the past 20 years?
One of the issues is that planning has a wider application than the agency necessarily gives it. So it’s unsurprising that some very senior planners sometimes find themselves constrained with an agency. If they go rogue or independent they can target not only marketing budgets but also R&D budgets and other client budgets and take their skills and apply them to other problems.
I’d like to say Ogilvy is a bit different because the breadth of disciplines within the Ogilvy group is such that actually you can deploy yourself fairly widely on an integrated bit of business. But I can see how if you have lots and lots of ways of adding value to a client’s business but you’re persistently required to be 90% billable on one client and simply to be concerned with the research and production of television commercials, that must feel a little bit limiting both financially and intellectually.
Of course, planners tend to be quite individualistic. They are very sensitive to things like work/life balance, and in many cases maybe they can earn 20% less but working half the time -- which is not a daft decision necessarily.
They’re also a little bit gen-Y before their time in that they don’t need the structure of an agency around them in order to function. They don’t need those weird things that account people need like a line of seventeen direct reports to make them feel important. To some extent what they crave is peer group approval and work/life balance and other things, but they’re not absolutely obsessed with their position in a managerial structure.
I’m not as extreme in my view of planning as the copywriter John O’Shea who once said “planners and creatives both drink from the same well of inspiration, but the difference is the planner gets to piss in it first”.
I don’t believe in the idea that they’re sequential processes. The ‘three man’ creative team can be incredibly powerful, although of course this is as much dependent on personality as it is in on anything else. But if you have a creative team who work very well with a senior planner, it’s an unbeatable combination.
Tomorrow on Nextness: Rory talks about the progression of his advertising career, his advice to young people joining the industry, and why company cars, perks and bling should be part of adland once again. Alex Campbell (@alexjcampbell) is a strategist with STW’s Lawrence Creative Strategy. His last article for Nextness was Efficiency is doing things right, effectiveness is doing the right thing: lessons from the AME Festival.
