A few weeks ago I was at the Asian Marketing Effectiveness awards in Shanghai. While there I was lucky enough to interview the one and only Rory Sutherland for www.nextness.com.au. Rory is an esteemed TED talker, vice chairman and executive creative director of OgilvyOne UK, and president of the IPA. Read part one of the interview here. Part two to come tomorrow. And here’s an extra bonus part of the interview that we couldn’t quite squeeze into the Nextness post: So you’ve talked about how the English speaking world is grossly over-supplied with media. How do you think this is playing out in our culture? The thing that frightens me is really a by-product of globalisation as much as anything - as much as digitisation - which is what you might call the disappearance of the middle class. Twenty years ago it was perfectly possible to make a decent living as say the 25th most successful writer in Denmark. You could probably make a living as the 200th most successful writer in Britain. Now, you’re either J.K. Rowling or you’re starving in a garage. Digital trends seem not to be doing any favours in terms of distribution of wealth. Tyler Cowan talks about this in his book The Great Stagnation. One of his points that really interests me is that when Henry Ford invented the automobile, he effectively created ten million blue collar jobs - for gas station attendants to change the the oil, for people to build the roads, for people to do all this stuff. So everybody in the United States got much richer from about 1900 to about 1974. Things that were once luxuries in 1900 became ubiquitous - like the refrigerator went from being a rich man’s ludicrous luxury to something most households had. What we’re seeing now is that Facebook creates six billionaires, it has 800 employees, and that’s about it. There’s an extent to which we’re not actually creating worthwhile employment. We’re creating value, but whether we’re creating really worthwhile, rewarding employment and distributing the wealth in a reasonably (or at least recognisably) egalitarian way is really up for debate. Yes, and the idea of the Great Stagnation is that we’ve picked all the low hanging fruit in Western economies… Given the general perception that innovation is proceeding exponentially, I agree that Tyler Cowan is right to sound a warning note about that. His arguments are that: 1) there isn’t anything obvious in the pipeline that you can democratise 2) consumer goods in Western nations are so cheap that more and more money goes into things like property, which are to a great extent economically useless In the West, I think evidence of this is things like 3D TV, which is evidence you’re slightly scraping the bottom of the barrel. Here in China it’s much easier, because there are probably 500 or 600 million people with no toilets, so plan A is pretty easy. Install them. So they have all this low-hanging fruit still to harvest.

A few weeks ago I was at the Asian Marketing Effectiveness awards in Shanghai. While there I was lucky enough to interview the one and only Rory Sutherland for www.nextness.com.au.

Rory is an esteemed TED talker, vice chairman and executive creative director of OgilvyOne UK, and president of the IPA.

Read part one of the interview here. Part two to come tomorrow.

And here’s an extra bonus part of the interview that we couldn’t quite squeeze into the Nextness post:

So you’ve talked about how the English speaking world is grossly over-supplied with media. How do you think this is playing out in our culture?

The thing that frightens me is really a by-product of globalisation as much as anything - as much as digitisation - which is what you might call the disappearance of the middle class.

Twenty years ago it was perfectly possible to make a decent living as say the 25th most successful writer in Denmark. You could probably make a living as the 200th most successful writer in Britain. Now, you’re either J.K. Rowling or you’re starving in a garage. Digital trends seem not to be doing any favours in terms of distribution of wealth.

Tyler Cowan talks about this in his book The Great Stagnation. One of his points that really interests me is that when Henry Ford invented the automobile, he effectively created ten million blue collar jobs - for gas station attendants to change the the oil, for people to build the roads, for people to do all this stuff.

So everybody in the United States got much richer from about 1900 to about 1974. Things that were once luxuries in 1900 became ubiquitous - like the refrigerator went from being a rich man’s ludicrous luxury to something most households had.

What we’re seeing now is that Facebook creates six billionaires, it has 800 employees, and that’s about it. There’s an extent to which we’re not actually creating worthwhile employment. We’re creating value, but whether we’re creating really worthwhile, rewarding employment and distributing the wealth in a reasonably (or at least recognisably) egalitarian way is really up for debate.

Yes, and the idea of the Great Stagnation is that we’ve picked all the low hanging fruit in Western economies…

Given the general perception that innovation is proceeding exponentially, I agree that Tyler Cowan is right to sound a warning note about that. His arguments are that:

1) there isn’t anything obvious in the pipeline that you can democratise

2) consumer goods in Western nations are so cheap that more and more money goes into things like property, which are to a great extent economically useless

In the West, I think evidence of this is things like 3D TV, which is evidence you’re slightly scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Here in China it’s much easier, because there are probably 500 or 600 million people with no toilets, so plan A is pretty easy. Install them. So they have all this low-hanging fruit still to harvest.

Tags: advertising economics 5 notes | | Jun 14, 2011
  1. alexjcampbell posted this