Disruption, fast and slow: an interview with Rory Sutherland
VIDEO: Michael Bayler, head of strategy at SharpEnd: The Agency of Things, sits down with ad legend Rory Sutherland to discuss the impact of disruptive technology on brands (Parts 1 & 2).
It was always going to be…a bit lively.
In the close to 15 years since Rory Sutherland and I have been sparring, with the greatest satisfaction, at the collision point of new technology and brand building, he has become arguably the most admired intellect in advertising. If anyone is the spirit of the greatest ad man ever, David Ogilvy, it is he.
As a glorious and too rare example of real cream rising to the top, he’s now installed as vice chairman of Ogilvy & Mather UK.
Rory is, as just about everyone reading this will already know, an outrageous teller of how it is, who refuses to be cowed by either tradition or received wisdom, a man whose apparently effortless wit – written certainly, but above all spoken – will ruthlessly have and hold you rolling on the ground in helpless laughter.
So as head of strategy for a strategic agency that has been set up with the single purpose of working with global brands at their troubled, exhilarating interface with disruptive technology, the prospect of another session in filmed conversation with the man himself was naturally irresistible.
As always in the past, we were able to blend – if I may presume to say – some very sharp and fresh observations with both profane and entirely new words.
Part 2
We spoke – as you’ll see in the videos above – largely about the Internet of Things (IoT). The focus of our enquiry was simply this: how might the IoT enable new and valuable forms of consumer service, and in turn, how might those effects impact the way brands are built.
This is not easy turf, IoT fan boys and girls notwithstanding.
Rory lays out some typically useful and incisive concerns about the way consumers experience technologically enabled services. Tesco’s iconic “Unidentified Object In Bagging Area” voice was agreed as a fantastic example of just how wrong this can go, where in contrast Firefox’s “Oops…” error message shows a very necessary – and still surprisingly rare – humanity.
Rory, as ever, has a robust and articulate behavioural underpinning to his argument. In this case, for touchstones for how consumers experience communications and services, he refers to dual process theory, better known as “System One and Two Thinking”. (Readers keen to know more about this important thread of work will I believe find the recent best-seller by Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics winner Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, a user-friendly and persuasive entry point.)
System One denotes, for example, fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic and subconscious, while System Two suggests slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating and conscious.
Where almost all effective advertising is System One, both structurally and tonally, Rory points out the dangers to which the IoT in particular is exposed to, of delivering System Two brand experiences that create both work and risk for consumers.
The overall message I took from this predictably enjoyable and high energy debate was this: without losing our interest and excitement around the field of disruptive technologies and their roles in brand marketing and communications, we must steer carefully clear of the “because we can” school of innovation. Rory, of course, has a far more compelling way of framing this caveat. But you’ll have to watch to find out what that is!
SharpEnd: The Agency Of Things is the world’s first strategic agency to combine deep brand insight with leading edge technology.