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RORY SUTHERLAND | Psychology In The World Of Advertising

Rory Sutherland is the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Advertising, an author & writer for The Spectator. Causing some form of behavioural change is the goal of all advertising and whoever holds the keys to understanding consumer psychology has an incredibly powerful tool at their disposal. Rory is one of the world's most influential advertising professionals and this episode is nothing short of gold for anyone who is a consumer, or advertises to them. More Stuff: Follow Rory on Twitter - https://twitter.com/rorysutherland Buy Rory's New Book Alchemy - https://amzn.to/2HdiUPL - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/modern-wisdom/id1347973549 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0XrOqvxlqQI6bmdYHuIVnr?si=iUpczE97SJqe1kNdYBipnw Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: modernwisdompodcast@gmail.com

Chris WilliamsonhostRory Sutherlandguest
Jan 28, 20191h 34mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 1:25

    Rory Sutherland arrives at full speed: why this conversation starts mid-thought

    1. CW

      (wind blowing) Hi, friends. My guest this week is Rory Sutherland, the vice-chairman of Ogilvy Advertising. Now before most podcasts start, there's a little bit of foreplay, backwards and forwards between myself and the guest, catching up and talking about what we're gonna talk about and stuff like that. With Rory, it was more analogous to me trying to step onto a train going at high speed, and he just, (laughs) he just began. So I started recording straightaway. Also, Rory had a British Gas technician come round to sort out his boiler partway through. So you will go through the adventure that is Rory's boiler, plus all of the amazing things that we spoke about today. He is an absolute master of behavioral e- economics and the psychology of advertising. Anyone who has ever bought anything in a shop should listen to this podcast. I, I'm not going to pontificate anymore because it's, it's just fantastic. Enjoy. (electronic music plays)

  2. 1:25 – 4:49

    Consumer capitalism as a “Galápagos” of human motivation (Red Bull, denim, Wikipedia)

    1. RS

      I was, I always regarded consumer capitalism as kind of the Galapagos Islands of understanding human motivation. Because, um, just as evolution throws up things, the duck-billed platypus, the kangaroo, et cetera, that don't really make much sense, um, uh, in the same way, consumer capitalism is interesting, both the things which shouldn't be successful but are, and the classic example of that is Red Bull, but I mean, you could actually ... If you think about some of the greatest business successes of the last t- ten, 20, 30 years, I mean, w- going back further, denim, for example, doesn't really make sense as a fabric.

    2. CW

      (laughs)

    3. RS

      The popularity of denim doesn't make any sense. It kind of fades. It looks a bit shit. It was manufactured as a wagon cover and then worn as overalls by indigent laborers. You know, you would've expected silk to have become big-

    4. CW

      Yeah.

    5. RS

      ... and the trouser front, but nope, it's not silk, it's jeans. Uh, then you've got things, again, you know, if you'd made a business case for Wikipedia on your last slide and said, "And the best thing is that everybody's gonna write this for free," okay?

    6. CW

      Yeah.

    7. RS

      Basically you would've been shown out of the room. It's completely insane. Red Bull, again, doesn't taste very nice, costs a fortune, um, comes in a tiny can, you know. No one making a case for that really would get anywhere. You know, no one knew ... In a Soviet-controlled economy, no one would have sat down with a, a, you know, the Supreme Soviet and said, "Well, for our next seven-year plan, what the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics really needs is an overpriced, disgusting-tasting drink."

    8. CW

      (laughs)

    9. RS

      But at the same time, I think it's interesting because I think what capitalism and evolution, uh, does is it throws up, um, you know, bonkers successes, but there are also things that fail that logically shouldn't. I mean, in the case of, in the case of, say, um, evolution, why is, um, parthenogenesis, or why is, in other words, um, asexual reproduction so very rare?

    10. CW

      Yep.

    11. RS

      Because if you want to replicate 100% of your genes, simply splitting into two, uh, is a, you would think, is a pretty cool, uh, system, what this sex stuff is-

    12. CW

      But you only need one of you, right?

    13. RS

      Yeah, exactly. And off you go. Uh, what seems to happen is that you, uh, when a disease hits, you all die. So sex is the-

    14. CW

      None of, none of the genetic variation.

    15. RS

      Sex is the diversity trade-off that means that some of your genes will survive. It's hedging your bets, essentially. It's, um, it's, you know, covering your bases, uh, because you'd rather have your genes survive, uh, split between a variety of different carriers-

    16. CW

      Yeah.

    17. RS

      ... than put all your eggs in one basket. Um, and I think what tends to happen is you do get these asexual reproduction things happening, and they're very, very successful right up to the point where they aren't.

    18. CW

      (laughs)

    19. RS

      And then when they fail, they fail spectacularly. Now is this my ... This might be unfortunately-

    20. CW

      (phone rings) Whoops. Is this your man from British Gas?

    21. RS

      Uh, hang on, I'm so sorry. Uh, this is-

    22. CW

      (laughs)

    23. RS

      ... this is gonna make this ... I suppose it's a very authentic podcast.

    24. CW

      Absolutely authentic podcast.

    25. RS

      Oh, I'm so sorry. I'd better go down, won't be a second.

    26. CW

      No worries.

    27. RS

      We can pause if you like.

    28. CW

      Yeah, we've paused.

    29. RS

      Right.

    30. CW

      And we're back.

  3. 4:49 – 7:21

    Perverse incentives: the China “hit-to-kill” story and what it reveals about systems

    1. CW

      They're a, they're a, a finickity and, and very fine-tuned, subtle, subtler device. So I wanted to talk about a news article which I got sent yesterday. I can't believe that I've never heard of this before, but you may have done. Have you heard of the hit-to-kill phenomenon in China?

    2. RS

      No.

    3. CW

      So ...

    4. RS

      Oh, is this this thing where it's more expensive if, if you hit someone and they survive, uh, it's m- it's more expensive because you get sued? Is that the thing?

    5. CW

      Essentially, yeah. So if you hit a person in China in a car, you have to pay their medical bills for a lifetime. But if you kill them, you only pay once, like a burial fee. So the fee for killing is about 30 to $50,000, but a lifetime of medical expenses is in the excess of millions sometimes. So there's these bizarre videos where drivers will hit someone and then reverse backwards and forwards over the body because it's more economical to kill than it is to injure.

    6. RS

      So you have ... I don't know if you know that film THX 1138, but that's, uh-

    7. CW

      (laughs)

    8. RS

      ... a very early George Lucas film. Uh, but that's the kind of world in which, um ... Oh, sorry.

    9. CW

      I'm just gonna go back to the

    10. RS

      Perfect, no problem at all. Um, in which, you know, the wh- the whole of the world is kind of controlled by accountants. Funnily enough, of course, that's true in the UK in that, uh, in the UK about five years ago, the insurance industry was hit by a young male driver who effectively plowed into a bus queue.... leaving a large number of people essentially critically injured and disabled for life-

    11. CW

      Okay.

    12. RS

      ... but not dead.

    13. CW

      Right.

    14. RS

      And I think the, the total cost of the claim came to something like 70 million pounds from one accident.

    15. CW

      Wow.

    16. RS

      Now, uh, someone in the insurance industry admitted to me, (laughs) they said that, uh, "We would have been considerably better off if he'd actually killed them all." (laughs) Um, because patent limbs (laughs) industry. Now, you've simply got to trust the insurance (laughs) industry in this case, um, uh, not to send people round to hospitals disconnecting life support systems, so Yes. ... it's um, and one would hope that that doesn't happen. Um, but, um, uh, of course, that, that fairly simple economic truth is, is true all over the world, uh, that, um, uh, it's only in China where presumably the people are uninsured. Is that right?

    17. CW

      I'm not sure about that. I think it ... uh, I don't understand why their insurance doesn't cover the expenses of a incident which is associated with their insurance. I'd have presumed that's what the insurance would have been there for.

  4. 7:21 – 10:29

    Dashcams, low-trust culture, and the weird trade-offs of recording everything

    1. RS

      I mean, we have to be careful about this because, of course, um, we, um, uh, the reason we have to be careful about this is there's an element of prejudice which is probably a bias, which is we tend to see the Chinese as slightly more calculating or unemotional, uh, and, you know, there's a whole bunch of sort of stereotyping going on there.

    2. CW

      Yeah.

    3. RS

      We've also got to remember that, of course, the pro- proliferation of ... uh, I mean, I- I think the Russians probably are pretty shit drivers.

    4. CW

      (laughs)

    5. RS

      But my, my impression of rough- Russian driving skills isn't helped by the fact that, um, dash cams are much more common in the Soviet Union, or were historically, or the, or in Russia, rather, uh, th- than they are in the West, and therefore, the- a disproportionate number of those videos on YouTube showing people driving in a bonkers fashion or trashing supercars or driving out in front of trains-

    6. CW

      Yeah.

    7. RS

      ... a disproportionate number of those are going to be Russian simply because, uh, in Russia, it seems to be that having a dash cam, uh-

    8. CW

      Standard fitting.

    9. RS

      ... is, is just a standard fitting, uh, whereas I- I don't have one.

    10. CW

      No.

    11. RS

      I've always asked that question, by the way, what happens if you've got a (laughs) dash cam and you make a terrible mistake yourself?

    12. CW

      Just throw it out the window.

    13. RS

      You throw it out the window or trash it or roll o- drive over it, do you?

    14. CW

      Oh, yeah. The- the tru- the ... unfortunately, the dash cam which logged the footage of me crashing into someone was destroyed in the crash as I crashed into someone.

    15. RS

      Ah. Right. Okay. So you have to-

    16. CW

      (laughs)

    17. RS

      ... reconstruct that story 'cause it did occur to me that I- I looked at buying a dash cam and thought, "This is a bit of a double-edged sword," isn't it? You know?

    18. CW

      Uh, there's a m-

    19. RS

      'Cause it's gonna, it's gonna capture my road rage. If I'm swearing at the guy in front-

    20. CW

      (laughs)

    21. RS

      ... it's gonna capture all that shit, which, you know, isn't necessarily gonna help me in a court of law. Um, and so it did occur to me that a dash cam, well, you know, maybe I'm better off without one. Um, who can say?

    22. CW

      Well, it depends. It's- it's hedging your bets there about whether or not you think that you're going to be the victim or the perpetrator of, of accidents more or less of the time, I suppose.

    23. RS

      I mean, it's a worrying thing in a sense because e- it is ... there's something about that that's indicative of a low, a low trust culture, isn't there?

    24. CW

      Yeah.

    25. RS

      You know, um, I like to think I'm the kind of person who regardless of the evidence, if it were my fault, I would s- you know. I know we're always told in a road accident, you must never apologize, never admit blame because of the legal implications, but I'd like to think if I ran into the back of someone, I'd basically say, "Look, fair and square, this is what happened."

    26. CW

      Yeah.

    27. RS

      And I'd take the hit. I'm, I'd like to think I'm that kind of person. And so the idea that we're not in a, we're in a society where, you know, the assumption is that other people are lying strikes me as a bit alarming.

    28. CW

      Yeah. I think you're trying to, (clears throat) we're trying to protect for a few odd situations where there's a little bit ... the, the system goes awry, so to speak, with that.

    29. RS

      Well, there are the fake whiplash claims, aren't there? Which, of course, are ... so in other words, someone will brake ... I mean, occasionally someone will drive in front of you and then brake stupidly, uh, in order for you to go into the back of them.

    30. CW

      There was families of people that were doing that, wasn't there? Driving across in-

  5. 10:29 – 12:12

    A drunk driver, a roundabout, and the luckiest breathalyzer in history

    1. RS

      I'll tell you a very wonderful story, which you'll love, which is very podcast worthy, which was, I ha- hasten to add, a friend of a friend of a friend, but I think it is actually true, which is-

    2. CW

      Detach yourself as far as you want from this story, Rory.

    3. RS

      Yeah, yeah. Exactly. He, he was driving home extremely drunk and, um, uh, drove onto a large roundabout on his way home and realized that he'd overshot and missed a turn. Now, you'd think the beauty of a roundabout, to a sober person, is that if you miss your turning, you can simply go around again. To the pissed mind, however, this isn't immediately apparent, and he immediately slammed on the brakes and started reversing-

    4. CW

      (laughs)

    5. RS

      ... back to the correct turn-off. While reversing back around the roundabout, he slammed into a car behind and he was just about to basically leg it when a police car turns up-

    6. CW

      Oh.

    7. RS

      ... just at the moment you don't want it to turn up, you see. And the police car just goes, "Hold on a second, sir. Will you m- just mind a moment? I've just got to speak to the driver behind you." And he sees the policeman go and breathalyze the man into whom he's reversed, you see, which to the cop is not irrational. If someone's hit a car in front, you assume the car behind is to blame. And the breathalyzer for the car behind comes up positive and the policeman then simply walks up to his, uh, his window and says, "Well, you really better go," he said. He said, "I'm terribly sorry. That guy behind completely out-"

    8. CW

      (laughs)

    9. RS

      "... out with the fairies. He told me that you came round the roundabout backwards and reversed into him." (laughs) And so this chap simply drove ... some, some guardian angel had man- managed to get- help him get away with it.

    10. CW

      So much serendipity there.

    11. RS

      (laughs)

    12. CW

      Oh my days.

    13. RS

      (coughs)

    14. CW

      Well, yeah, that is thanking your lucky stars situation, isn't it?

    15. RS

      It is really (laughs) a, yeah.

  6. 12:12 – 15:36

    Toilets, bidets, and why obvious innovations don’t spread (plus videoconferencing)

    1. CW

      I wanna, I wanna move onto the most pressing topic at hand, which is the debate between wet and dry toilet, toilet paper and whether or not you should have a b-day or a, the Arabic shut offa-... uh, in your house.

    2. RS

      Yes. Well I, I'm a big fan of the Shatoofa, I'm a big fan of the Japanese toilet, I'm a big fan of moist toilet paper. I mean, it seems to me, my father who's 88 said the same thing, that the whole business between getting up in the morning and leaving the house... If you consider the extraordinary improvement in terms of time saving that's brought to us at other times of the day by things like the dishwasher or indeed online shopping if you choose to use it, or the washing machine, all the extraordinary entertainment made possible by television, that part of the day has been transformed since my father was born in 1930, okay? Since his own father was born in about 1895, it's unrecognizable. And yet the first part of the day, nothing... You know, shit, shave, shower <|agent|><|en|>

    3. CW

      (laughs)

    4. RS

      ... basically nothing's happened. We still have a Victorian, uh, first half hour of the day.

    5. CW

      Yeah. We're primitive.

    6. RS

      We are totally primitive. And it strikes me that th- this is an area where there's huge potential for innovation. But, you know, the reason moist toilet paper also fascinates me, because it's one of those things... And the, the immediate parallel is what we're doing now, which is video conferencing. It's one of those technologies which should be big but isn't. And it seems very strange to compare moist lavatory paper with video conferencing-

    7. CW

      What we're doing right now, yeah.

    8. RS

      But both of them you can make a fantastic logical case for, okay? So I ma- I make the case for moist, uh, lavatory paper. How come our anus is the only part of the body which we think it's adequate to clean with dry paper? I'm entirely with the Islamic world on this one, I'm with the Japanese on it, because you wouldn't go out into your garden with some fairly harmless earth, potting some plants, and you'd come in and go, "Oh look, I've got mud on my hands, let me rub them very vigorously with some A4-"

    9. CW

      (laughs)

    10. RS

      "... printer paper to remove the mu-" You'd kind of use water, wouldn't you? Okay? And the fact that we in the West, who consider ourselves so advanced, clean our rectums with dry paper is ridiculous, okay?

    11. CW

      (laughs)

    12. RS

      You can just about excuse people I suppose who do it first thing in the morning and then have a shower or bath. You can say, "Okay, that's something." But I mean, at least that Arabic tube thing is at least a nod in the right direction. Um, I find it a bit weird that you occasionally get them... I was in a prison in Qatar, long story, uh, but they have the tube, but they don't have any toilet paper, which is a bit weird. I'd have both

    13. CW

      Well, the pr- the problem that I've found... So, Yusuf, who is one of the co-hosts of the show, he recently purchased his first property, and one of the mandatory things that he had to have ahead of a washer-dryer combo was a Shatoofa in his-

    14. RS

      I agree with him.

    15. CW

      ... in, in his bathroom. But the problem is that it's right next to the boiler, so the water pressure that comes out-

    16. RS

      (laughs)

    17. CW

      ... if you don't have... if you're not able to hold sufficient anal tone and ring tension, you end up accidentally giving yourself an enema with your own-

    18. RS

      (laughs)

    19. CW

      (laughs) With your own shit.

    20. RS

      Oh my God. So sort of colonic irrigation through, uh-

    21. CW

      But reverse, yeah.

    22. RS

      ... reverse, of course.

    23. CW

      You're putting it back in.

    24. RS

      Oh my God. Of course. Oh my God.

    25. CW

      (laughs)

    26. RS

      Um, okay. Um, because I'm having my bathroom done at home, uh, later on this, uh, year, so I-

    27. CW

      Consider it.

  7. 15:36 – 24:02

    Testing “real utility” with pensioners: Alexa, air fryers, and designing for extremes

    1. RS

      I think I will consider one of those, because I, I, I agree with you. I think it's barbaric that we don't have them. And actually, very strange actually, two things. One of the things... I often talk to my dad about this. My dad's 88, so you have this very interesting contrast. I also buy gadgets for my dad to see whether he uses them or not as a kind of experiment, because I'm the kind of idiot, okay, who'll buy any old shit.

    2. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    3. RS

      You know, I bought yogurt makers, bread makers, I bought any bloody gadget that I can simply because I enjoy its intrinsic gadgetiness.

    4. CW

      Yeah.

    5. RS

      And so I always find it interesting buying my dad things, because, um, what he likes and what he doesn't is revealing as to what's genuinely useful. Because I think, I think at the age of 88, you, you've got a fairly sensible take on what's life improving and what isn't. I bought one of the Google, uh, HomePod Minis, which is like Alexa, it's like the Echo Dot-

    6. CW

      Yep. Yep.

    7. RS

      ... but the Google equivalent. And, uh, I wrote about this in The Spectator, and a few people said, "Oh, what, what the hell are you doing plugging, you know, Amazon and Google's products?" As though as if they need any help. My argument for this was that mostly those products were being sold as ways to turn on your lights remotely, control your thermostat. Now, I do all that shit, because I'm weird, okay? My argument was that for your Spectator reader or your Spectator reader's mom and dad in their 70s or 80s, it's a technology none of those people will buy off their own back. There's not a chance in hell that anybody aged 80 is gonna wander into Curry's PC World and go, "Get me an Amazon Echo Dot or a HomePod Mini."

    8. CW

      Yeah.

    9. RS

      Actually, it's... if you think about it in pensioner terms, it's the world's best radio for 30 quid.

    10. CW

      Yeah.

    11. RS

      Okay? It'll play any music you want, you just ask for it. It'll play any radio station you want. It'll tell you the time, it'll tell you the weather, it'll tell you how to cook a turkey. So 30 quid for the ability to speak to a supercomputer. And interestingly, my dad only installed it on, uh, about the 27th of December, but he uses it about, you know, six or seven times a day.

    12. CW

      Really?

    13. RS

      Brilliantly, after I wrote that article, a friend of mine told me that his mom is in a nursing home where they bought, um, an Echo Dot, and they put it in the lounge of the nursing home. Now, I think this is a brilliant idea. Now, no one's ever thinking and no one's gonna position a, a tech product as it's perfect for oldies, okay?

    14. CW

      Yeah.

    15. RS

      Because it's kind of the kiss of death in marketing terms, you know. It's rather like, "I bought from a, a company which only sells products to the elderly and disabled."

    16. CW

      (laughs)

    17. RS

      "I bought a lo- (laughs) I bought a long-handled dust pan and brush."

    18. CW

      Right.

    19. RS

      So it's a dust pan with a really long handle and a brush with a really long handle, which means you don't have to grovel on the floor when you've tipped some cornflakes, okay? Now, it's a brilliant product for the disabled, but it's also a pretty brilliant product for anybody who isn't disabled.

    20. CW

      Yeah, it's the fact-

    21. RS

      And yet-

    22. CW

      ... that it's not sexy, isn't it? That's the problem.

    23. RS

      I know. No, no, no, I know. Actually, there's... I mean, this is one of the most interesting questions in tech, which is, how come we put a man on the moon before we thought of putting wheels on luggage?

    24. CW

      (laughs)

    25. RS

      I, I, I mean, genuinely, you know, i- i- if you think of the level of genius required (laughs) , okay, between those two, those two enterprises.

    26. CW

      Yep.

    27. RS

      You know, it was literally long after we'd had a mat, long after we'd had, you know, tranquility base, etc., someone thought, "Well, this luggage stuff, actually most of the weight could actually be borne by the floor." And using a wheel, which is not an unfamiliar invention, you know. Now, okay, I'm sure that what's happened partly is that sideline tech like skateboard inline wheels became more and more affordable as a byproduct perhaps of skateboarding or something of that kind.

    28. CW

      Yeah.

    29. RS

      Uh, that the technology somehow improved. Nevertheless, you could've had a basic wheeled suit case in 1890.

    30. CW

      It could've been something, something beforehand. So are you saying, weirdly, that giving products to pensioners is kind of like the litmus test, Occam's razor, canary in the coal mine for whether or not a product's very-

  8. 24:02 – 30:17

    Why “easy” gets devalued: macho signaling, business travel, and the hidden costs of email

    1. RS

      And so there's an interesting question which is, I mean, n- there's a wider question here which is, are things which are easy sort of stigmatized or devalued? And so video conferencing fascinates me because are businesses reluctant to adopt it simply because it is comfortable, pleasant, and you can do it from home? So is there this sort of macho signaling which is, "No, no, no, if it's a serious business meeting, you get up at six o'clock in the morning and you fly to Frankfurt," and that what we're doing is we're signaling commitment through effort? Now, that wouldn't matter if the effort were actually beneficial.... I mean, I mean, an example of a technology that just as, okay, evolution leads to brilliant things which work fantastically which none of us would ever have thought of, but it also leads to dumb, runaway, what's called Fisherian runaway of the peacock's tail. Okay? Where you get effectively runaway arms races between different males, say, to attract female attention. It always occurred to me that the typewriter as a technology was emblematic of that in that it meant that for a period... The word processor's a different matter because you can take shit, edit it, you know, change the addressee. You know, you don't have to type the same thing 47 times. Word processor is a different thing. But the typewriter essentially meant that for a period of about 100 years, everything produced by a serious business had to be written twice. And then if it needed editing, because I- I'm just about old enough to remember when you'd get shit typed for you at work. It was only really the first two or three year- years of work where you'd hand-write a memo and your PA would type it up and distribute it. But I can just about remember this. And it was really stupid because there'd always be a mistake or you'd change your mind about something, which actually meant that what you had to be written ended up being written four times. Uh, older Ogilvy people have told me that you had to, um... Basically, if you were a young person at Ogilvy in the 1960s and '70s, you had to spend about two or three hours a week as a kind of Terry Thomas in the typing pool. So you'd have to go-

    2. CW

      Oh, you had to grease, you had to grease everyone up when you started. Yeah.

    3. RS

      You'd have to go in and go, "Hello, gorgeous creature."

    4. CW

      (laughs)

    5. RS

      Uh, and then do all the... You know, go in with your velvet smoking jacket. "Well, hello." And, um, uh, uh, the reason for that is if you didn't have a bank of favors and affection of the typing pool, you couldn't get anything written. And so you were more or less ineffectual at your job. You had to... Everything you did was a favor trade. Now, senior people could just go, "I need these seven things typed out." But if you were junior, you were put at the bottom of the pile. So your only chance of escaping obscurity was by essentially doing the Leslie Phillips act. Uh (laughs) don't... Exac- You've come directly... (laughs) Exactly, yeah.

    6. CW

      Bringing in the donuts and the scented candles and all that sort of stuff. Yeah.

    7. RS

      And, and it must have been too extraordinary in a sense. And now the advantage of that, of course, o- over email was that the only shit that got out was important because you actually had to burn some favors to get it produced. Whereas under email, any idiot can basically generate huge amounts of work for somebody else without any cost to themselves.

    8. CW

      Uh, everyone who's listening will know that, right? The amount of test information that we get.

    9. RS

      Everybody who does. Uh, the email would be an example of one of those. So where tech goes wrong I think is a really interesting question because it's similar to where evolution goes right. Inventiveness, extraordinary kind of, um, uh, e- e- extraordinarily inventiveness and, and an unbelievable way to solve problems laterally and through unexpected sources. But the downside is that we, we can essentially become embroiled in utterly senseless competition. And I think email... I think email is a case where it feels like work, and therefore we assume it's productive. But okay, we're doing this as a, as a video conference. Okay? Now, if this podcast were recorded with us speaking at the speed we could type with, you know, pauses of a couple of hours in between responses. So my next sentence would be, "Imagine if you..." Now, you wouldn't have any listeners. It'd be painfully slow. But when we're typing, we're not conscious of the contrast between the speed of typing and the speed of speech. So we think, "Oh, I'm typing quite fast here." You know, "I'm really being productive." Now, despite the fact that that email exchange that takes place... Oh, sorry, have you finished?

    10. NA

      I've just got to go and do some paperwork, I'll be back.

    11. RS

      Paperwork? Fantastic, I won't be long. Yeah. Okay, so an email exchange that takes place over three days and takes an hour of your time possibly could have been settled in a four-minute phone call.

    12. CW

      Yeah.

    13. RS

      "Do you want to do that?" "Yeah." "No, I wouldn't do that." "No, no, no." "Okay, well, what about..." Okay, you're out. But that... But weirdly, when we're engaged in that three-day-long, hours, hour and a half's time crafting the emails back and forth, we're not conscious of the relative inefficiency in the same way that we're not conscious of the fact that the Victoria Line's much faster than the other tube lines. And I don't know if you knew this, but the Central Line and the Victoria Line are pretty fast, the Jubilee Line's fast, Northern Line's pre- Circle Line's fucking... You know, that's continental drift basically.

    14. CW

      (laughs)

    15. RS

      Um, but nobody notices how fast the Victoria Line is because the time between stations is about the same. What you don't realize is the distance between stations is much, much further apart. So actually, you're really welling it on the Victoria Line for significant periods of time.

    16. CW

      Yeah.

    17. RS

      But our consciousness doesn't tell us that. And I weirdly spent... Oh God, I didn't even go there. Uh, I'd spent 30 years of getting to Euston Station, um, not realizing that if you go f- go to Victoria and get on the Victoria Line, you get to Euston in about eight minutes. I mean, it's teleportation-

    18. CW

      (laughs)

    19. RS

      ... compared to the other routes. And, um... So I always find this really interesting. I mean, uh, w- where A, the, where human perception lets us down, B, where what we invest our time and attention on in terms of innovation, uh, can be extraordinarily counterproductive. And as I said, I mean, you know, I would say what we should have done is we should have announced the Alexa as, you know, for all elderly people living alone, this is one of the best things to happen in 10 years.

    20. CW

      Yeah.

  9. 30:17 – 35:35

    Skeuomorphs and adoption lag: light switches, electric kettles, and selling electricity

    1. RS

      And yet nobody's mentioned that. Okay? They're all going, "Ooh, you can turn your lights on." Well, yeah, but you can do that with a switch. By the way, great story about light switches. And this is ano- another fascinating thing about how technology works. The first electric lights mimic the first gas lights in that the switch was beside the light. You may remember, American standard lamps often have that thing you turn-... at the top and it seems a bit weird to us, but that's actually a skeuomorphic mimic of how you'd turn a gas light on or off, by twisting a little flange.

    2. CW

      (laughs)

    3. RS

      Diana said -

    4. CW

      Fantastic term.

    5. RS

      Flange, right. (laughs)

    6. CW

      (laughs)

    7. RS

      And, um, so the first electric lights in America, you'd wander into the center of the room, reach up towards the bulb, turn a knob, and the light would come on. People went, "Oh, brilliant, it's electric." And then someone said, "Well, you can actually put the switch right next to the door, so when you come into the room, you just turn the light on." Now, you'd think people would go, "Fuck, why didn't we think of that?" Okay. But they didn't, they went on a completely unnecessary luxury. So they went on for 10 or 20 years, basically bumping into furniture in the dark-

    8. CW

      (laughs)

    9. RS

      ... trying to find the light. Because this seemed to them, at the time, a completely unnecessary indulgence.

    10. CW

      It's this odd artifact of what's already existed, sort of thing.

    11. RS

      What's already exists, so I've already solved that problem, so therefore, uh, in my mind, it isn't a problem because, you know. And it's really fascinating, you can actually find... And I was looking at this the other day. I looked on Google Images for ads for electricity. Now you're gonna say, "What the..." You know, if you ever moved to a house, okay, which wasn't on the electrical grid, right, basically day one you go, "Okay, the first thing we've got to do is we've got to get this wired for electricity." I'm not even... You know, the idea that you'd have a salesman come out and explain to you why it was a good idea, okay? (laughs) The idea that this guy would have to come round and go, "Well, the great advantage of having electricity is..." You go, "What the fuck are you talking about?" Right?

    12. CW

      Yeah, exactly. "Mate, just, can you just please put the wires in -

    13. RS

      "Can you just please put the wires in?" Right?

    14. CW

      ... for the love of God." Yeah.

    15. RS

      But, of course, in the early days, you actually needed to do this. And it's fascinating because you can see these ads, and as a copywriter myself, I can imagine myself writing exactly the same shit, okay?

    16. CW

      (laughs)

    17. RS

      So it's an ad, I think, by the Dublin Corporation encouraging people to get electricity in their homes. And one of the great things it does, it says, "Well, Maureen, with my new electric kettle," okay, now, you know, "I can simply flick it on, I don't need to light the stove, and it produces hot water." Now, and, the copywriter then goes on to imagine two possible consumer benefits from this that none of us have ever adopted. He says, "So first of all, when I'm having tea with you, I don't leave the kettle on the stove. I have it on the table between us, so if we need to top up the pot, I don't even need to get up from the table." Okay?

    18. CW

      Yeah.

    19. RS

      "And every night, I take my kettle upstairs to bed so I can have a cup of tea in the bedroom."

    20. CW

      Okay.

    21. RS

      Now, the fascinating thing there is they make both of them are true. Two benefits of having an electric kettle is, one, you can make tea in any room of the house, okay? Two, you can actually have the kettle anywhere you want it to be, not necessarily on the stove. The strange thing is that nobody, as far as I know, ever does any, either of those two things. We have the kettle-

    22. CW

      It's a stationary object. It stays in the same place.

    23. RS

      It's a stationary object. I've never moved it anywhere else. The, okay, some people had teas made, but it's never occurred to me, you know, to take a kettle into my bedroom.

    24. CW

      Yep, thankfully.

    25. RS

      But I mean, oh, for a lip sip have I ever done it? No, don't think so. I go into the kitchen-

    26. CW

      Well, you, you'd put it in the cup downstairs. And the other thing as well is if, if you did do that...

    27. RS

      Oh, one second, I've got, I've got, I've got, um, here we are from the, uh...

    28. CW

      If that's okay?

    29. RS

      It's all done, isn't it?

    30. NA

      Yeah, good as gold. Um, you actually had three leaks on there.

  10. 35:35 – 39:54

    Marketing’s overlooked role in prosperity—and the American bias toward improvement

    1. CW

      Yeah, might not, might not be straight down the middle of the representative demographic, but yeah. Um, what do you think this says about the value of advertisers then? Because I know you've got-

    2. RS

      Why...

    3. CW

      You've, you've got a very interesting analogy you use about alchemy which I absolutely love.

    4. RS

      Well, I think that marketing and advertising in terms of both behavior change and also creating the context for things, that enables us to see why they're desirable, might be much, much more important in terms of economic growth, productivity, and, um, uh, and, and just the wealth of nations than economists have given it credit for. Now, one thing I'd say is that the United States enjoys a huge advantage as an economy, not only in its productive capacity, its scale, its, you know, um, uh, size, but also in the nature and character of its inhabitants.... which is f- for good and ill, and it's not always for good, okay? But Americans are, if we're being cynical European and a bit snooty, they're a bit credulous and some, you know, "Oh, wow, look at..." You know. Greg Proops used to do a fantastic comedy routine about this, which is, you know, the American at Disneyland versus the Brit, you know.

    5. CW

      (laughs)

    6. RS

      And you see a giant eight-foot mouse and the American's going, "Hey, gee, kids, do you see that? Like, he really does live here." And then there's the British dad who sort of looks round and there's a six-foot mouse, "Oh, for fuck's sake." You know.

    7. CW

      Yeah, exactly. Mate, if you've got nothing better to be doing on a Saturday.

    8. RS

      Have you got nothing better to be taking something in a...

    9. CW

      (laughs)

    10. RS

      And so, the American belief that life is capable of continuous improvement, which I'm- I have to say, I mean most of the nice things that have happened in cynical Europe have probably happened on the back of that American ni- you know, i- you know, just as actually most of the really worthwhile shit was invented by people in sheds in the Midwest, you know, let's give them credit for this because... I mean, Brits haven't been bad. Scandinavians have been, you know, and the French do. The French are very weird, they're either very conservative or very inventive.

    11. CW

      Yeah.

    12. RS

      I can't get my head round that at all.

    13. CW

      Yep, yep, yep.

    14. RS

      They're either the most inventive, creative people in the world or like the most weirdly conservative.

    15. CW

      Yeah.

    16. RS

      Um, and both I guess. Um, but, um, but actually, you know, uh, what is it? I mean, you know, 50% of the innovations that actually make life pleasant and livable and easy, um, you know, have probably come from the US in some shape or form. And they've been adopted because of that American belief that there's always a better way of doing something.

    17. CW

      Is that because it's such a young country, do you think?

    18. RS

      Mm-hmm.

    19. CW

      I always, I always think this when I, when I think about the difference, especially between the UK and America, I always draw this analogy that the way that Americans talk, this kind of top-down love for the country.

    20. RS

      Yeah.

    21. CW

      Like I've never once heard an English person say, "Do you know what it is? I really just love England, I wanna do it for my country." It's the sort of thing that you associate with like far-right activists and people with skinheads.

    22. RS

      Yeah, which is a terrible shame actually, because, I mean, we've got quite a lot to be pretty... I mean, you know, th- th- to be absolutely honest, I mean, the places, uh, living here, it's pretty great, actually. I mean, um, bel-

    23. CW

      Apart from the weather, it's, it's fantastic.

    24. RS

      Yeah, apart from January, February, March.

    25. CW

      (laughs)

    26. RS

      Yeah, no, no, I agree, yeah. I- I mean clear out January... If you could ever find a life... Uh, my father, funnily enough, said one of his regrets was he said, "By the time you kids had left home, what I should've done in my late 60s is b- bugger off to Spain for January, February, March."

    27. CW

      Had a holiday then.

    28. RS

      Or bugger, bugger, you know, because it wouldn't have cost very much. Turn the heating off at home, you know. And, um, uh, you know, those are the three worst bits. I mean, mind you, a hell of a lot of the world has that. I mean, Chicago is beautiful in spring and autumn. New York actually, New Yorkers are convinced they have a great climate but actually it's too fucking cold in the winter and it's too fucking hot in the summer.

    29. CW

      (laughs)

    30. RS

      And when there's a heatwave in New Y- or a cold snap in New York it's unlivable, whereas London rarely does that, you know.

  11. 39:54 – 51:35

    Mobility myths, credential inflation, and rethinking student loans as ‘young person loans’

    1. RS

      Well, I seriously worry about this, and it's a weird one because if you look at all these statistics which everybody believes, which is essentially all the gains have gone to the richest X percent, okay? A- and, um, uh, essentially the middle class have become completely trapped in a kind of income trap where they're earning no more than their parents were. Now, the interesting thing about this narrative is that according at least to Robert Frank... Uh, sorry, not Robert Frank, Russ Roberts, sorry. It's actually not true. Now let me just explain this in a second. One, it's perfectly possible to have a society where everybody's getting richer but where every decile of the population is getting poorer, provided people are moving from poorer deciles to richer deciles. Now, part of the reason there are more poorer people is there are more students who are poor and there are more, um, uh, there are more immigrants, who tend to be poorer when they start, not necessarily when they end, and there are more retired people. Then household composition is smaller as well. Uh, divorce has affected things, smaller, you know, smaller numbers of people per household changes the whole balance of things. But actually, if you look at people, if you look at what's called panel data, which is the same people researched over time, actually the poorest, the people who start off poorest are very likely to become quite a bit richer, and the people who start off richer over a period of 10, 20 years are quite likely to drop out of that top decile.

    2. CW

      Really?

    3. RS

      So the idea that there's no social mobility, if you look... Now the only, the only perspective that we care about, because I'm not an aggregate decile of the population, okay, I don't l- you know, um, the only thing we really care about i- is my life getting better? And for most people, except actually the richest who tend to get a bit poorer, um, for most people who start off poor, so students for example are notionally poor but they don't think of themselves as poor in the same way that maybe retired people don't because they've, you know, they, they, they, they see themselves as investing in their future.

    4. CW

      It's a byproduct of that particular s- um, area of their life, that particular period of their life, right?

    5. RS

      Yeah, and it, it's something you do in order to become richer later on, that's the logic mind. Whether that, whether it's overblown, that's a separ- totally separate debate, and whether actually h- further education's become a bit of a peacock's tail, you know, a kind of credentialist arms race I think is probably true, um, to a degree. Uh, but I'll park that for now 'cause it's a whole separate discussion.... um, I mean, I, you know, I think it's become a bit cr- uh, I, I think, you know, that you now get people who go, "Well, you know, if I want to get a really good job, I, I, you know, uh, it's not enough to have a degree. I've got to have an MD PhD."

    6. CW

      You need a fucking PhD, yeah.

    7. RS

      You need a fucking PhD. I'm kind of going, "Oh, for fuck's sake," you know? I mean, actually, you'll learn more in a job. I mean, part of the thing that annoys me is the implicit insults, that when you're at a s- uh, uh, at an institution of higher education, you're learning loads, and the second you go into a job, you become some sort of slack-jawed, mouth-breathing moron-

    8. CW

      (laughs)

    9. RS

      ... who never learns anything. I mean, you know, uh, you know, I, I went to Cambridge for three years, I then spent three years at Ogilvy working with people like Drayton Bird and Steve Harrison, uh, you know, extraordinary kind of creative people and advertising people. I learned just as much in those three years at Ogilvy as I did in, you know, at, at university. And it's a, it's, it's a bit of a, it, it, the idea that somehow you need to be spending all your time acquiring these credentials strikes me as a, you know, pretty dubious-

    10. CW

      I'd agree.

    11. RS

      ... act.

    12. CW

      I couldn't, I couldn't agree more. When, when I went to university, I started, I sat next to my business partner in my first ever seminar. Sat down, sat down next to him, complained about the fact that I was skint, and from then, we started working together. And 12 years later, I've still not been able to get rid of him. But (laughs) he'll be listening.

    13. RS

      Yeah.

    14. CW

      Um, I'll, I'll receive a pay cut for that because he's the one that controls the accounts as well. Um, so-

    15. RS

      What, what you do, by the way, is I've just read about this, uh, this group detained in Dubai. You move to Dubai and then you get him to sign checks.

    16. CW

      Right.

    17. RS

      And then you cancel the check so he gets sent to jail.

    18. CW

      Fantastic. Yes.

    19. RS

      Th- th- there we go. So that's the trick.

    20. CW

      I've got rid of him, Darren-

    21. RS

      You gotta, you gotta move to Dubai, yeah.

    22. CW

      ... Darren Bailey gonna take you on an expensive laugh.

    23. RS

      So you get him to sign a few checks, which yet then you refuse to honor as the partner.

    24. CW

      (laughs)

    25. RS

      And then he gets banged up in jail and you take over the company. It's, apparently it works every time.

    26. CW

      (laughs) Well, uh, yeah. Cool. I'll have to-

    27. RS

      But there you go.

    28. CW

      I'll have to make sure that he doesn't listen to this one so he's not expecting it.

    29. RS

      (laughs)

    30. CW

      But that'll be fine. So yeah, we sat down, we sat down next to each other in our first ever seminar, and very quickly, we started operating, uh, a business f- from HR, advertising, marketing, uh, uh, dealing with suppliers, dealing with consumers, everything front and backwards facing. As vertically and horizontally integrated as y- you can imagine. And at the same time, I was doing a business degree at Newcastle, and I was, uh, dealt a fatal dose of contrast between what the real world was showing me-

  12. 51:35 – 1:07:11

    Regulating stereotypes in ads: tropes, representation, and preference vs prejudice

    1. CW

      Yeah. I totally get that. Um, I wanted to talk about the recent UK advertising watchdog release that spoke about-

    2. RS

      Mm-hmm.

    3. CW

      ... how it will be cracking down on what it termed sexist stereotypes in ads. Do you think this is a significant change or is it natural progression? What's, what's your view on this?

    4. RS

      To some extent the sexist stereotype... Um, in a sense there's been a reverse sexist stereotype for quite a long time which is, uh, which a lot of men find very irritating, which is you have to portray the man as a bit of an idiot and the woman as the sage, fount of all wisdom oracle. Because if you do it the other way around, you get massive complaints. And it, that can get a bit, and you know, that can get a bit tedious. Um, uh, th- there is a problem, of course, with stereotyping, uh, in advertising and TV, which is simply that, um, uh, (laughs) well, I mean, okay. Um, if you only have 30 seconds, there is an element where when you've got 30 seconds or 60 seconds to tell a story, to some extent you have to rely on tropes, because things which are odd, okay, throw the viewer completely.

    5. CW

      You need the archetype, right?

    6. RS

      So, so at some-

    7. CW

      You need them to be able to infer so much more...

    8. RS

      So at some level you-

    9. CW

      ... of the co- the story, yeah.

    10. RS

      Now, by the way, by the way, changing ethnic stereotypes, I'm entirely in favor of that. I mean, it's worth remembering that you get, you get some weird stuff going on in that there was that much-applauded, uh, Nike ad about London which is very, very ethnically diverse except for a complete absence of Indians. Um, uh, anybody of subcontinental origin seems to be completely missing. Um, now that may be because people, people from the subcontinent are only really interested in one sport, which is cricket.

    11. CW

      Yes.

    12. RS

      Uh... (laughs)

    13. CW

      Fair point, fair point.

    14. RS

      Okay.

    15. CW

      And Nike aren't very big in cricket, so yeah.

    16. RS

      Um, yeah. And so, so there may be an element of that. But, um, uh, we, I mean, uh, I don't know. I mean, good advertising, first of all, uh, you can, you can, you can push at stereotypes but you can only push so fast and so far, because, you know, if you think about it, if you'd shown, um, uh, for example, it would've been very good in 1970 to show a gay couple in one sense as an archetype or, you know, creating a, you know, a, a norm. But the ad would've become entirely about... All discussion of the ad would've become entirely about that.

    17. CW

      Yeah.

    18. RS

      So you didn't. You had the Oxo family, because then you just said, "Default family. This is what families are like," okay? And then the centrality of Oxo was communicated in a way that would've been much more difficult if you'd set out to be an absolutist. I mean-... okay, you could have made Goodfellas not using, for example, Italian Americans or Sicilians-

    19. CW

      Yep.

    20. RS

      ... okay? But using, I don't know, Latvians, right? And it would have been less (laughs) stereotyped-

    21. CW

      (laughs) .

    22. RS

      ... but it also would have been a bit of a weird film.

    23. CW

      You would- but you wouldn't have got, you wouldn't have communicated across the subtlety. I talk about this a lot when people, um, mention Love Island to me. They talk about the TV show and they say that there's a, a lack of diversity in terms of, um, character depth and complexity in that. And I'm like, "Look, you've got 45 minutes of 14 people's 24-hour periods." Like, it's like 350 hours of lived life every day that you need to try and fit in.

    24. RS

      Yes. Yeah.

    25. CW

      And you're like, you do not have the time to convey the subtlety and the nuance of someone's very specific views about exactly what they want from a girl or a guy. It needs to be that's the hero, that's the villain, that's the maiden, that's the redeemed, that's the nerd, that's the da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, because it allows us to expedite the route from character introduction to character maturity.

    26. RS

      No, I think that's, uh, uh, uh, you're absolutely right. In, in terms of short storytelling under constraints, there's a, there's this... First of all, you want attention to be attached to something where, uh, you know, uh, uh, in one place, and, and so anything too weird... David Ogilvy always said, "Look, if you just want your ads to gain attention, show a gorilla in a jockstrap."

    27. CW

      (laughs)

    28. RS

      The point is you can gain attention, right? But, uh, the danger is if y- i- if you do anything too... Now Ford got into huge trouble because when they reproduced, uh, an ad showing factory workers in Essex in Poland, right, uh, they replaced some of the Black faces with white faces for the Polish market. Now I, (laughs) I didn't go on TV to defend this because the whole thing had become a kind of PR nightmare. But you've got to remember that the population of Poland is probably, I don't know, 99.5% white, that if there's a car factory in Poland, the car workers are overwhelmingly Polish of ancestry. Now if you had had a car factory with the correct ethnic mix, which was perfectly used in the British brochure, by the way. I'm not, uh... Um, now you could say, "Okay, this is because Poles are racist," which is not an implausible hypothesis, okay? But equally, to have, let's say, 30%, um, Afro-Caribbean employees in a, what is supposed to be a Polish car factory would be like having a British car factory where there were seven Navajo Indians. The point is that you wouldn't, you'd be going, "What the fuck (laughs) is going on here?" Right?

    29. CW

      It's not representative, right?

    30. RS

      It's simply not representative. And they got into huge grief about that, and I'm, you know, it was an insensitive thing to have done, but at the same time, I understand why they did it because simply, you know, if you're in Poland, the ethnic composition of Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic or whatever is not the ethnic composition of London. Um-

  13. 1:07:11 – 1:22:18

    Attention economy & data: why efficiency thinking breaks persuasion (and why China scares him)

    1. CW

      Um, so I wanted to, I wanted to ask what your thoughts are on the future of the attention economy and whether or not-

    2. RS

      (laughs)

    3. CW

      ... people are gonna continue to give away their attention and their data so readily.

    4. RS

      It's very interesting. Um... On data, I'm completely messed up because... It's w- with my attitude to data, it's a bit like the attitude I have towards whether my chil- what my children do on the internet. And that was always the problem, which is, look, I can either police them to within an inch of their lives, or I can just trust them. There doesn't seem to be a very easy middle ground that doesn't involve a huge amount of work. Do you see what I mean? So either I basically go and say to my kids, "Look, you know, if you see anything in the internet that disturbs you or if there's a bloke being a bit pervy and weird, let me know, and I'm gonna trust you. Otherwise go and look at what you like." Which is what I more or less did. Or you do this thing, which I often think backfires by the way, which is you police every minute of their use. You put, you know, every single safeguard on their bloody internet access, which simply means they go around to their friend's house and look at Pornhub, as far as I can see.

    5. CW

      (laughs)

    6. RS

      Um, you know, it tends... I'm, th- those people whose parents are m- Uh, the, the children I notice whose parents are most protective are also the most devious.

    7. CW

      Yeah. Yeah. It just drives it underground. It's subversive.

    8. RS

      It just drives it, kind of drives it, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

    9. CW

      Did you see, there was a recent New York Times article saying that Silicon, Silicon Valley tech workers make sure that their children's nannies keep them away from all technology?

    10. RS

      Mm-hmm.

    11. CW

      And that some of these nannies get sacked if they come home and find that their child says, "Oh, I played on an iPad today," or, "I did this, that, and the other."

    12. RS

      Yeah.

    13. CW

      Which says an awful lot, like the same as drug-

    14. RS

      Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs wouldn't let his kids have iPads, I think.

    15. CW

      Well, yeah. It's the same, it's the same, um, theory as drug dealers don't use their own supply, right? Which I think is super intres- So what do you think about the, the attention economy then as we move forward? How is that gonna work?

    16. RS

      Um... So the data question, I think, is sometimes overblown, actually, in that the idea that this is the new oil. Um, the data question is assumed to be absolutely vital, uh, when it's actually sometimes useful, sometimes useless. I think that a large number of people in tech, and indeed a large number of people in advertising and marketing, have misunderstood a- the, how marketing works, and they've tried to turn it into an efficiency game. And I think a large reason why marketing works is precisely because it's inefficient. The costly signaling, in other words, the fact that you're talking to a large group of people simultaneously through media which are perceived to be expensive, using celebrities or creative talent or filmmaking skills or storytelling skills, which are in short supply and therefore seen as scarce and valuable, is what actually gives advertising its meaning. Now how do you send a wedding invitation? Now you could send it by email, but that would be really shit, wouldn't it? Naturally no one would come, 'cause they'd assume there was going to be a pay, a cash bar, you know.

    17. CW

      (laughs)

    18. RS

      Okay. In order to send a wedding invitation that says, "I am committed to this partnership," you can throw money at it, you know, which is, you know, full-page ad in Vogue, okay? It's gilt-edged wedding invitation, uh, printed on hard c- card with, um, engraved, uh, curly-type text.

    19. CW

      I've, I've got one on my, I've got one on my fridge, which has come with a fridge magnet-

    20. RS

      You've got one on your fridge?

    21. CW

      ... that's got a heart and it's made on wood and it's engraved and-

    22. RS

      Brilliant. Yeah. Yeah, that, that's br- brilliant. Yeah. Okay. Now, you, you throw a stack of money at that and you do it conventionally, and everybody goes, "Ah, this is a serious wedding," right? You know you're-

    23. CW

      No one, no one's not turning up to that wedding, are they, when they've got the fridge magnet?

    24. RS

      No, it's not, no, no, no. They're, they're not. No, no.

    25. CW

      Yeah, exactly.

    26. RS

      You could use craft and effort, which you can make something by hand. You could use humor, which is another scarce commodity. You could produce an email newsletter that was really, really funny. But what you couldn't do is just email the parents of Florinda So-and-so, "Request the pleasure of your company," blah, blah, "At the measure of their meas- marriage of their daughter So-and-so to Mr. Dave Whatever-it-is." Okay? You can't just send that as an email. The meaning actually resides not in the textual informational component. This isn't really information theory. This is signaling theory, and they're different things. And the obsession with data is all about, how can we make this message really efficient? But in a way, there can be really clever efficient messages, and I don't dispute that that's part of what advertising is about. But the real way you build trust in a brand is to make it, is to make it famous, uh, in an expensive way.

    27. CW

      Yeah. Do you think that this is people doing the, avoiding doing the hard thing, which is the c- the very, very creative copywriting, which is the subtle and nuanced approach to delivering a message to the market and stuff like that, and focusing instead on this slightly more kind of spectrum side, um, use of the data where it's-

    28. RS

      (laughs)

    29. CW

      ... what frequency, what open rate, what particular kind of et cetera, et cetera?

    30. RS

      I think Silicon Valley sees everything as an efficiency game. It sees everything as a time and money optimization problem, and it's now straying into fields where that doesn't apply. Don't get me wrong, in things like manufacturing and s- you know, in, in, uh, i- i- in certain areas, the correlation between efficiency and effectiveness is pretty high.... you know, economists aren't totally insane about this. But in various things, marketing, military strategy would be another one, uh, you know, there are quite a few areas of life where actually the asymmetry between the sender and the receiver, or the attacker and the defender, the informational asymmetry requires you to do things which are irrational. And it was very interesting, there was a- a case where a man basically tried to murder his wife by tampering with her parachute. I don't know if you saw this.

Episode duration: 1:34:48

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