Rory Sutherland on why advertising actually works

My extra special guest this week is Rory Sutherland, the vice-chairman of Ogilvy UK. it wasn’t actually this week we recorded it some time ago but this is the final part of our interview.

We chopped it into 3 parts because we spoke for such a long time and he packs so much into every minute of the interview, it made sense to break it up just so I could take it all in, reflect, come back to it.

In this part, for instance, we talk about:

1. Why placebos are a good thing and why marketers should use them more in our marketing
2. How we can take a perceived weakness of a product and turn it into a strength. The most famous example of this is probably, Avis, we’re number two so we try harder.
3. We discuss why his book, Alchemy has been so popular with the finance community in America. Probably because they’re all obsessed with rational and irrational decision making.
4. His conversations with the Nobel Prize-winning Daniel Khanneman author of thinking fast and slow. wouldn’t you have loved to be a fly on that wall? They talk about the focusing illusion which says, ‘nothing is as important as we think it is, as we are thinking about it. which could be the whole reason why advertising works at all.

I’m not gonna give a big long intro to this, I’m just gonna say, without me keeping you in suspense any further, my conversation with Rory Sutherland.