My Best Marketing Tips #21: Ogilvy UK / Rory Sutherland / Vice Chairman
Rory Sutherland has been at the heart of creative marketing since 1983 when he joined Ogilvy as a graduate trainee. Throughout his career, he has adopted the latest technologies and embraced the Internet and now video calling and remote working, observing the influence these new trends can have not just on marketing, but also work life in general. This week’s Best Marketing Tip is a collection of fascinating nuggets of wisdom from our recent catch-up.
When I asked Rory about his tips on how to deal with being overwhelmed, we started a conversation about the best ways to use time and productivity, which went beyond a marketing discussion and reached into useful ways to balance work and personal time and evolve with the times, too.
What is the best marketing tip you’ve ever received and who was it from?
“Carve out sufficiently long blocks of time to do that kind of work which can’t be split into segments.” – This is a combination of observations and learnings I’ve taken from various pieces of work, including Paul Graham’s “Marker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” and work we are doing in-house with a team of psychologists at Cambridge University looking at efficiency and optimisation.
How have you put this marketing tip to good use?
It’s interesting to see the difference in how blue-collar and white-collar jobs operate. I believe that blue-collar workers’ time has been optimised to within an inch of their life, becoming as efficient as possible, whereas this doesn’t apply to us in white-collar jobs.
We not only don’t spend our time the most efficiently, but we allow diary and email software to distract us permanently. We direct our time very badly because we tend to think of units of the day as being fungible when they’re not.
If I want to work completely uninterrupted and truly focus, I always take myself away from home, away from the office, and seclude myself completely for as long as it takes to complete the creative process.
What marketing tips does the industry need most right now?
Creativity boils down to a mixture of curiosity and observation. What we’re observing today is the social norming of video calling, the acceptance that, actually, people can indeed work from everywhere and prefer that to sitting in an office from 9 to 5, five days a week.
Our current white-collar job setup requires us to do long commutes and live in cities we can’t afford to live in, in order to come to the office and attend meetings we actually don’t need to be there for. At the same time, Zoom calls have made it possible for meetings that wouldn’t have otherwise existed to take place. They’ve been great for introverts and they hold great potential for allowing people more freedom.
I have two tips that emerge from that. Firstly, as far as companies are concerned, we’ve always focused on how much free time we give people. In fact, people value “free where” and “free when” rather than free time. Giving people the opportunity to work flexibly, where and when they choose, is the best way to reward staff where possible.
Secondly, we need to be more random. The barriers to gain from randomness have gone down thanks to video calling. We can start to think laterally, embrace new opportunities and meet with people we wouldn’t have met otherwise. This means marketing agencies can now open up their services to new clientele – pretty much anyone will give you an hour on Zoom for a quick meeting, so the cost to engage with new markets and new projects has reduced significantly.
What is the marketing tip you give most often?
Because we can now connect so much more easily with each other, I tell my team to be more random every day: offer new services to a new audience, speak on new podcasts, have conversations with people you wouldn’t normally talk to, attend an online webinar on a subject that is only tangentially related to the work you do.
All of these little random acts can make you more creative and open new doors. Zoom is the new best tool for serendipitous encounters, so use it!
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