Name: Rory Sutherland: Life lessons from an ad man
Uploaded: 2013-04-28T14:20:04.000Z
Duration: 16 min 40 s
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This is my first time at TED. Normally, as an advertising man,

Adverbs of manner

I actually speak at TED Evil, which is TED's secret sister

And I particularly remember a really good speech

by Kim Jong Il on how to get teens smoking again.

But, actually, it's suddenly come to me after years working in the business,

which is intangible value -- you might call it perceived value,

you might call it badge value, subjective value,

If you think about it, if you want to live in a world in the future

where there are fewer material goods, you basically have two choices.

You can either live in a world which is poorer,

Or you can live in a world where actually intangible value

constitutes a greater part of overall value,

that actually intangible value, in many ways

Here is one example. This is a train which goes from London to Paris.

The question was given to a bunch of engineers,

about 15 years ago, "How do we make the journey to Paris better?"

And they came up with a very good engineering solution,

and knocking about 40 minutes off a three-and-half-hour journey time.

Now, call me Mister Picky. I'm just an ad man ...

... but it strikes me as a slightly unimaginative way of improving a train journey

on spending six billion pounds on those railway tracks?

Here is my naive advertising man's suggestion.

What you should in fact do is employ all of the world's top male

pay them to walk the length of the train, handing out free Chateau Petrus

Now, you'll still have about three billion pounds left in change,

and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down.

Now, here is another naive advertising man's question again.

have an obsession with solving the problems of reality,

when actually most problems, once you reach a basic level of wealth

in society, most problems are actually problems of perception.

They seem fantastic to me. They cost very little to develop.

or if they do, they're imaginary, so you can safely ignore them.

So I was discussing this. And I actually went to the Marginal Revolution blog

by Tyler Cowen. I don't know if anybody knows it.

Someone was actually suggesting that you can take this concept further,

The point is that education doesn't actually work by teaching you things.

It actually works by giving you the impression

that you've had a very good education, which gives you an insane sense

which then makes you very, very successful in later life.

So, welcome to Oxford, ladies and gentlemen.

But, actually, the point of placebo education is interesting.

rather than that tedious, hardworking and messy business

Here's a great example from history. I've heard this attributed to several other kings,

Fredrick the Great of Prussia was very, very keen

for the Germans to adopt the potato and to eat it,

because he realized that if you had two sources of carbohydrate,

wheat and potatoes, you get less price volatility in bread.

because you actually had two crops to fall back on, not one.

The only problem is: potatoes, if you think about it, look pretty disgusting.

And also, 18th century Prussians ate very, very few vegetables --

rather like contemporary Scottish people.

So, actually, he tried making it compulsory.

"We can't even get the dogs to eat these damn things.

They are absolutely disgusting and they're good for nothing."

There are even records of people being executed

He tried the marketing solution, which is he declared the potato

as a royal vegetable, and none but the royal family could consume it.

And he planted it in a royal potato patch,

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Rory Sutherland: Life lessons from an ad man

people

man

potato

food