Saturday, October 17, 2009
Q&A with Rory Sutherland: An advertarian's take on the world
The TED Blog caught up with ad man Rory Sutherland the evening before we posted his TEDTalk. Drawing on the work of behavioral economists, Nobel Prize winners and others, he talked at length about his personal philosophy of Advertarianism, about President Obama and the healthcare debate, and even threw in some analysis on the future of media use and advertising. Not bad, considering it was well past bedtime in the UK.
a couple of extracts (full transcipt available at link):
It’s not that marketing-driven or advertising-led solutions can solve everything. That’s absolutely not true. What seems strange to me, though, is that people don’t at least try them first. Instead, governments try to solve their problems by compulsion. My view is that we should try and solve the problem by persuasion, and if that fails we can try compulsion or harder-level nudging. For this reason, I think the book Nudge is one of the most important books of the last five to ten years.
I think Paul Romer has the answer, in truth. I thought Paul Romer’s speech at TED was actually magnificent. The idea of charter cities: absolutely fascinating. To change something at a national level is impossible. What you need to do is create cities that operate on new models and new institutions, and trial the new thing at that scale and then, effectively, let it spread outwards. That’s an interesting question, whether you should try it state by state in some form.
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