Alchemy

Rory Sutherland has worked at Ogilvy for 33 years and started in its direct marketing arm. He spent the first ten years of his career telling clients to target more, and the last ten saying almost the opposite. Targeting and its optimisation, he argues, have turned into an obsession that reduces media planning to an efficiency game. In this talk he wants qualitative judgement back alongside the numbers.

You'll learn why Rory advised Google to promote a new product by direct mail, what marketers can learn from the bees that ignore the hive's waggle dance, and why digital media should mainly be used to explore. He explains why performance marketing often just discounts a purchase that would have happened anyway, and what he calls the Wolford paradox: the advertising people now see online bears no relation to where their money actually goes.