We kicked off this two-part series by tackling Scott Galloway’s provocation: “I haven’t seen an ad man in a board meeting in 20 years... tech, utility, and algorithms have permanently defeated brand.”
In Part 1, Ty Gates showed us how advertising can fight back…
Now, for Part 2, we bring in the heavy artillery: Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, author, and behavioural science star.
Does Rory think we’ve entered a post-brand era? Absolutely not. In fact, he argues brands are the essential “Darwinian feedback mechanism” of capitalism - and even Galloway himself can’t escape buying brands when he thinks he’s just buying utility.
In this episode, Rory takes direct aim at the current corporate obsession with using AI and tech simply to slash budgets. As he bluntly puts it: “It’s not cost saving if you’re making your customer pay the price.”
Along with dismantling the cost-cutting panacea, we go down a few other great rabbit holes:
☝ AI’s True Potential: Why using AI just to replace jobs on a 1-to-1 basis is the most boring, stupid use case - and why founders are more likely to use it to create entirely new forms of value exchange.
✌ The “Tight Fitness Function”: How narrow financial metrics and the need for constant quarterly reporting are destroying business biodiversity and making companies less innovative.
🤟 The Star Bar Effect: Rory’s favourite chocolate bar and what we can learn from it…
(Bonus: If you want even more of Rory’s genius after this episode, check out his classic TED Talk, “Perspective is Everything” 🧠)
