Rory Sutherland

You're using tech pros as like a... No, no, no.

It's perfectly reasonable to say that the people who work in this field are not representative of the whole human population.

That's a reasonable assertion.

What is it you're representing when you say tech pro, though?

Anybody in a tech industry, just as anybody in advertising, myself included, is overweighted towards a belief in the ability of advertising to solve all problems.

And I will truly admit that I am guilty as charged.

However, ad people don't get that much opportunity to convince other people of the rightness of their argument.

What has happened is that in marketing, for example...

The tech companies, the consulting firms that sell stacks.

And I owe a lot of this to a guy called Adel Borki, very interesting self-taught Libyan marketing writer, former boxer.

Adel Borki, and I coined the phrase technoplasmosis by analogy with toxoplasmosis, which is tech people and consultants have taken over the finance department so that the marketing metrics the finance department uses

has faith in and demands from marketing are not those metrics which are most conducive to building brand and customer value over time.

They're the metrics which are most conducive to selling tech solutions to the companies.

What are the metrics that are?

Well, it's all about short term transactional, bottom of the funnel, click through, you know, how can you shovel money to meta in a slightly more efficient way?

It's not about long term value creation at all.

Now, don't get me wrong, all that bottom of the funnel, short-term transactional stuff is very important to get right.

I'm not disparaging it, but it's only a third of the game.

Right.

And they're not interested in the other two-thirds of the game because they don't make money if someone spends money on their call center or, you know, upgrades their call center staff or allows the call center staff to call out.