Advertisers must prioritise differentiation over sameness, despite what CFOs demand, according to Rory Sutherland, vice chairman at Ogilvy London.
Speaking at AANA's RESET 2026: Growth Through Disruption conference today, Sutherland argued the industry's creativity problem stemmed directly from finance departments gaining disproportionate control over agency decision-making.
“You will never come up with a fucking original idea,” said Sutherland.
He attributed this decline in industry creativity to financial team’s controlling interest in company dynamics.
“The second you hand anything to finance, you'll end up with cost cutting in some shape or form,” he said.
“You'll also end up with twice as many finance people, for some reason, because their enthusiasm for using headcount never actually applies themselves.
“You go to any WPP agency now, and in the finance department, you can see the fucking curvature of the Earth — It's just stretching away into the distance, and for some reason, they seem to have a limitless budget.”
That financial dominance, Sutherland said, had produced a culture of performative process that stifled creative thinking.
"Every single advertising agency you'll talk to will pretend there's a thing called the process. There is — it's complete bollocks. In effect, what you do is you talk shit until you get lucky," he said.
"The reason we have to pretend there's a process is because procurement would go batshit insane if they thought there were a single second of anybody's time which wasn't directly accounted for."
Sutherland was equally pointed about compliance-driven structures, telling the audience that rigid sequential logic had no place in creative work.
“If you're one of those process people, you know, in compliance or whatever, who demands absolute rigidity of sequential logic in every single thing everybody in a business does,” he said.
“Absolutely fine, but if you get a nasty infection, you deserve to die.”
The solution, he argued, was not to compete harder on existing terms but to find uncontested ground entirely.
“Every single business will tend to benchmark against every other business, which means they become more and more similar, more and more like those vulture,” Sutherland said.
“In the process, they leave a massive blind spot. There's something that none of them are benchmarking, none of them are measuring, none of them are competing on.
While taxi companies competed on price, speed and pickup time, Uber identified a different problem entirely: the anxiety of the wait.
By letting customers see in-app how far away their driver was, Sutherland said Uber eliminated the ambiguity of the taxi wait, something no other company was capitalising on.
“All the best ideas from penicillin to Viagra were accidental discoveries where the working out was done later, not first,” he said.
“What we've done is we've tried to make business look rational by putting a rational bit at the beginning.
“The massive opportunity cost of that, is that downstream, there's almost no space for the imagination.
“That's how you reset. You change the order in which you address problems and the nature of the people who get to define that and frame those problems first.”
Looking at the Australian market, Sutherland urged advertisers to revisit tools that had fallen out of fashion rather than chasing novelty.
"Virtually everything in marketing falls into disuse because of fashion, not because of any good reason,” he said.
“Jingles still work. Songs still work. Long copy press advertising still works. Direct physical mail still works."
On AI, Sutherland was cautious, arguing its value depended entirely on how it was deployed.
"I think it'd be perfectly possible for AI to create a giant narration of an incredibly slow bureaucracy where productivity goes down,” said Sutherland.
“If you could use AI to actually get people working in parallel rather than in series, the opportunities seem much more exciting and much more creative."
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