Rory Sutherland

It may well have been the client who had that idea.

They are held responsible for every single unit of cost they incur, year by year by year by year.

You cannot offset any of those costs against the value you created in 2023 by having a huge idea.

Let me give you an example.

There's an enormous idea for a very large, enormous American, let's say, fast-moving consumer goods company.

There's an idea conceived by Ogilvy Australia.

It has made that company in excess of a billion dollars in the last 10 years.

It's still running.

It runs in something like 100 markets.

Still useful today.

For that idea, the agency in Australia got paid 350,000 Australian dollars.

Or rather, that's what they made from it.

So in other words, you have a billion dollar idea.

You get to buy a small flat in a crap part of Sydney.

Now, what I'm saying is that this is not me bleating about the advertising industry.

It's saying that anything like R&D or marketing, which is fat-tailed, in other words, a small percentage of what you do, it's Jeff Bezos' point about in business, in baseball, you can only score four.

In business, you can score 1,000.

In marketing...

When you score 1,000, and the purpose, half the purpose of marketing is not operational, gradual, incremental improvement.

It's finding another way to hit the ball out of the park and score 100.