Rory Sutherland is reaching for an analogy to describe his newfound status as one of the UK’s most viral TikTokers. “It’s a bit like Lord Byron, I woke up and found myself famous.”
That he conjures up the name of a 19th-century romantic poet tells you a lot: Sutherland is not your average social media influencer.
In fact, on an app flooded with toned, tanned and shiny-toothed twentysomething content creators, he stands out as one of the most unlikely TikTok sensations of the day.
A 58-year-old Cambridge graduate and advertising executive, Sutherland shares old-school tricks of the marketing trade, which are lapped up by millions of viewers, many of whom were not alive during the 1980s advertising boom.
He has 2.4m likes in total and his latest video alone has achieved more than 600,000 views.
Far from being a corporate anachronism, now he is stopped by schoolkids in the street asking for selfies.
Sutherland – vice-chair of the firm Ogilvy UK – says his TikTok success lies in the everyday insights into how human behaviour is manipulated by cunning marketing tricks.
One popular video debunks the illusion of choice when buying wine in a restaurant. Because there is no known price point, restaurants deliberately sell wine at a markup and push customers to buy it through suggestion, he says.
The fact it is called a “wine list” not a drinks list, added to the presence of wine glasses already set out on the table, makes for an irresistible customer trap.
“They’ve already bloody nudged you in that direction with the glasses, now they’re bringing you a wine list.
“How is the wine list laid out? The first eight pages are bloody wine and then the final back page, for like perverts and deviants, they might deign to list whisky, cider, beer and other drinks.”
Sutherland’s 23-year-old twin daughters find their father’s new fame as confusing as he does. He says: “My kids are completely mixed about this fame, in that they partly find it amusing – and it can give them a certain currency among their contemporaries – but I think they are also slightly baffled by it.
“Occasionally they meet superfans, one of whom said that he had met Mick Jagger, but was much more interested in meeting me, which even I thought was utterly ridiculous.”
Sutherland, who has a column in the Spectator, himself did not set up the TikTok account that has brought him so much success. The account was created by an aspiring film-maker and fan of Sutherland who cut clips of the marketer’s various podcast interviews and talks on YouTube and uploaded them to the platform.
Eventually Sutherland and Ogilvy bought the account from its creator and have continued the upload process themselves. “I don’t have any sense that this was a resentment because he thought of doing it and I didn’t, I can only be grateful for him for spotting it,” he says.
“It’s a reminder of the potency of digital and social media. I’d have to appear in Big Brother or Strictly to achieve a commensurate amount of fame that quickly.”
While the humorous delivery is part of the charm, Sutherland says the gatekept information he provides about the marketing industry is the thing that keeps people coming back.
“It occurs to me that there’s a lot of knowledge in ad agencies or the marketing departments of Unilever, or whatever. Knowledge which … if every small business, if every cafe in Britain, got just a little better at understanding the stuff then you could put a percentage point or two on GDP,” he says.
And what of the dark arts, the subtle moves made by big corporates to elicit more cash from their customers? Is there something sinister to these hacks? Sutherland prefers to see the lighter side.
“I think that understanding how you change behaviour: with economists, it always boils down to bribing people, and with lawyers it always boils down to forcing them to do it through threat and fine or imprisonment.
“There is a third solution, a far more libertarian solution, which is when you ask nicely, right? Logically, that’s the one you should explore first.”
Whether by charm or marketing, Sutherland’s old-school selling tips have certainly influenced the behaviour of the incurably online Gen-Z scrollers of TikTok. But getting them to buy wine may be a pitch too far.
