Rory Sutherland is looking for an analogy to describe his new 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 it evokes the name of a 19th-century romantic poet says a lot: Sutherland is not your average social media influencer.
In fact, on an app flooded with toned, tanned, sparkly-toothed twentysomething content creators, he stands out as one of the most unlikely TikTok sensations of the day.
Sutherland, 58, a Cambridge graduate and advertising executive, shares old-school tricks of the marketing trade, which are appreciated by millions of viewers, many of whom were not alive during the advertising boom of the 1980s.
It has 2.4 million likes in total and its latest video alone has achieved more than 600,000 views.
Far from being a corporate anachronism, he is now stopped by schoolchildren on the street asking for selfies.
Sutherland, vice president of the Ogilvy & Mather group of companies, says his success on TikTok lies in everyday insights into how human behavior is manipulated through clever marketing tricks.
A popular video debunks the illusion of choice when buying wine at a restaurant. Because there is no known price, restaurants deliberately sell wine at a markup and pressure customers to buy it through suggestions, he says.
The fact that it is called a “wine list” and not a drinks list, added to the presence of wine glasses already placed on the table, makes it an irresistible trap for the customer.
“They’ve already pushed you in that direction with the glasses, now they bring you a wine list.
“How is the wine list arranged? The first eight pages are blood wine and then the last last page, because, like perverts and deviants, they could deign to list whiskey, cider, beer and other drinks.
Sutherland’s 23-year-old twin daughters find their father’s newfound fame as confusing as he does. He says: “My children are completely mixed about this fame, in the sense that they partly find it funny (and it may give them some popularity among their contemporaries), but I think they are also a little bewildered by it.
“Every now and then they meet superfans, one of whom said he had met Mick Jagger, but was much more interested in meeting me, which even I found completely ridiculous.”
Sutherland, who has a column in the Spectator, did not himself create the TikTok account that has brought him so much success. The account was created by an aspiring filmmaker and Sutherland fan who cut clips from the marketer’s various interviews and podcast talks on YouTube and uploaded them to the platform.
Eventually, Sutherland and Ogilvy purchased the account from its creator and continued the upload process themselves. “I don’t have any sense that this was a grudge because he thought about doing it and I didn’t, I can only be grateful to him for noticing it,” he says.
“It is a reminder of the power of social and digital networks. “I would have to appear on Big Brother or Strictly to achieve a commensurate amount of fame that quickly.”
While the humor is part of the charm, Sutherland says the insider information it provides about the marketing industry is what keeps people coming back.
“It occurs to me that there is a lot of knowledge in the advertising agencies or in the marketing departments of Unilever, or whatever. Knowledge that… if every small business, if every café in Britain, improved their understanding a little bit, then one or two percentage points could be allocated to GDP,” he says.
And what about the dark arts, the subtle moves made by large corporations to extract more cash from their customers? Is there something sinister in these tricks? Sutherland prefers to see the brighter side.
“I think understanding how you change behavior: with economists, it always comes down to bribing people, and with lawyers it always comes down to forcing them to do it through threats and fines or imprisonment.
“There is a third solution, a much more libertarian solution, which is when you ask nicely, right? Logically, that is the one you should explore first.”
Whether for charm or marketing, Sutherland’s old-school sales tips have certainly influenced the behavior of TikTok’s incurably online Gen Z users. But getting them to buy wine may be going too far.