Profile: Rory Sutherland

Rory Sutherland: "Ogilvy as a whole, as a group within WPP, is probably the largest marketing services group under one brand in the UK. So it embraces everything from advertising to direct marketing, interactive and digital, health care communications, design packaging, promotion, activation -- pretty much the whole gamut of marketing services, with one or two exceptions.

"I've been at Ogilvy, and this is slightly unusual, I've been at Ogilvy more or less uninterruptedly for 20 years. In the course of that time, I've worked on pretty much everything -- American Express, BT a great deal, I worked a small amount on Ford, one of our largest clients, quite a bit on IBM, before that on Microsoft, on Compaq... I've also most recently worked in a few other financial services brands, presently doing a little bit of work for Zurich, that's what I'm doing today.

"What I did yesterday is completely different from what I'm doing today in some cases. To an extent, large parts of the business are reactive. You simply try and make opportunities or you try and exploit them when they come along. What I try and do, if you want my meta job description, is to turn the size and breadth of the Ogilvy group into a competitive advantage and into an advantage for our clients.

"Everybody has to be best at what they do. By no means am I disputing the need for a focus on being very very good in your field. What you've also got to make sure you do is stray outside your field, that you don't become so focused on doing one thing brilliantly well that you overlook the fact that the answer may be something else.

"I probably wanted to work in advertising when I was 12 or 13. I just loved advertising. What I think inspired me to do it was...there's a really nice quote from Eddie Izzard where he says 'I'm not a capitalist, I'm a creativist. Capitalists want to create things so they can make money, I want to make money so I can create things.' It's quite a nice distinction. I think the reason I went into it is that I have the temperament of a businessperson -- my father was a small businessman. I like business, I respect business, I'm fond of it, I'm perfectly comfortable with good ideas dedicated to increasing a client's profit. I don't have any feeling that that involves compromise or anything of the kind.

"Everybody's path into this business probably has a fair amount of accident in it. It's not one of those pretty, linear professional careers where, if you hold onto your hat and keep your nose to the grindstone for five years, you will progress automatically from X to Y. There's probably a huge amount of luck in it -- I acknowledge that simply because I think it's true. Nobody who's successful in this business can honestly attribute it purely to merit.

"I don't know whether you're born or made entirely. The latest research done by the IPA, involving a thing called diagonal thinking, I think is very very helpful. It might help people with a real inherent talent for this business to self-identify.

"The only job of anyone in marketing is to turn human understanding into business advantage, or social advantage if you're working in social marketing or for government accounts or whatever. That's your job. Now behavioral economics has done a wonderful job of actually linking human behavioral quirks, biases, assumptions, heuristics, how people think, with how they make decisions and how they spend money. Increasingly things like neuroeconomics will make more advances here. And this is what finally put advertising and brands on a proper economic footing. This is the role a brand plays in the economy."