Rory Sutherland
Born in Monmouthshire in 1965, Rory Sutherland spent a probationary year teaching Classics before applying to marketing and advertising agencies and joining Ogilvy & Mather Direct in 1988.
He was involved with the agency’s relaunch and restructure as OgilvyOne after his promotion to creative director in 1997, went on to become executive creative director in 2002 and, more recently, vice-chairman of the Ogilvy Group in the UK.
Sutherland’s meteoric rise is attributed, in part, to his understanding of the possibilities of digital technology, one of his passions. Once famously described as the worst graduate trainee Ogilvy & Mather had ever hired (he was fired from the planning department before joining the creative department as a junior copywriter), he understands the importance of finding your ‘secret weapon’ when trying to carve an advertising career. Speaking to The Drum and quoting Ogilvy’s love affair with direct mail, Sutherland says: “David Ogilvy described direct mail as his ‘....first love and secret weapon’. I suppose my own passion now would be experience design, because it sits at that sweet spot where technology and psychology overlap.”
His advice to graduates trying to make a name for themselves in the industry, then, is to “try to become good at two overlapping things, rather than specialising in one. All real progress nowadays comes not from within specialisms, but from the collision of two different specialisms.” When asked how brands can better interpret digital consumers, Sutherland argues that context is often overlooked in marketing messages, and that consumers shouldn’t be separated into digital or analogue silos.
“It isn’t about consumers being digital or analogue. Most consumers will form their impression of brands from a whole mixture of digital and analogue media – and of course real world experiences. What we need to understand much better is the idea of context – the idea that messages should have a target moment, not just a target audience.”
Another question in today’s measured advertising world is the question of accountability versus creativity – how can the two coexist? Sutherland believes it’s impossible to calculate the value of a brand by placing hard value on all of its individual contributions. “I am a huge devotee of measurement and experimentation, which are often the handmaidens of creativity. But accountability is the wrong word to use. It demands a degree of certainty and predictability which is a dangerous aspiration for any system that involves something as complex as mass human behaviour.
“If you seriously believe it is possible to calculate the value of a brand by isolating all its contributions to the value of a business and then placing a hard value on all of them, then you are either the most brilliant mathematician in the world or a bit of an idiot.”
Sutherland’s meteoric rise is attributed, in part, to his understanding of the possibilities of digital technology, one of his passions. Once famously described as the worst graduate trainee Ogilvy & Mather had ever hired (he was fired from the planning department before joining the creative department as a junior copywriter), he understands the importance of finding your ‘secret weapon’ when trying to carve an advertising career. Speaking to The Drum and quoting Ogilvy’s love affair with direct mail, Sutherland says: “David Ogilvy described direct mail as his ‘....first love and secret weapon’. I suppose my own passion now would be experience design, because it sits at that sweet spot where technology and psychology overlap.”
His advice to graduates trying to make a name for themselves in the industry, then, is to “try to become good at two overlapping things, rather than specialising in one. All real progress nowadays comes not from within specialisms, but from the collision of two different specialisms.” When asked how brands can better interpret digital consumers, Sutherland argues that context is often overlooked in marketing messages, and that consumers shouldn’t be separated into digital or analogue silos.
“It isn’t about consumers being digital or analogue. Most consumers will form their impression of brands from a whole mixture of digital and analogue media – and of course real world experiences. What we need to understand much better is the idea of context – the idea that messages should have a target moment, not just a target audience.”
Another question in today’s measured advertising world is the question of accountability versus creativity – how can the two coexist? Sutherland believes it’s impossible to calculate the value of a brand by placing hard value on all of its individual contributions. “I am a huge devotee of measurement and experimentation, which are often the handmaidens of creativity. But accountability is the wrong word to use. It demands a degree of certainty and predictability which is a dangerous aspiration for any system that involves something as complex as mass human behaviour.
“If you seriously believe it is possible to calculate the value of a brand by isolating all its contributions to the value of a business and then placing a hard value on all of them, then you are either the most brilliant mathematician in the world or a bit of an idiot.”