One common lament you would commonly hear at the IPA over
the last few years concerned the lack of diversity in advertising agencies.
“The whole industry is still dominated by white Oxbridge graduates”.
You won’t hear that any more – as I’ve put a gagging order
on it. For it simply isn’t true to say there are too many Oxbridge graduates in
advertising. There are hardly any – do a survey if you like - Cambridge graduates in agencies anywhere. There
are, however, far too many Oxford
graduates.
It’s an important distinction. After all, if you want to
populate the agency of the future, do you want to fill it with people from a
place where they split the atom, discover DNA and write Principia Mathematica, or do you want people who have spent three
years poncing about in a linen suit while carrying a stuffed bear?
At TED Stephen Fry recently observed of the Protestant
reformation that Cambridge produced the martyrs
and then Oxford
burned them. We ourselves need fewer politicians: we need more dissenters and
sceptics, not people whose chief talent is advancing their political careers by gently fellating the status quo.
The problem we have faced as an industry is that we have
been forced to become an excessively arty industry for want of a science to
call our own. Many mathematical and scientific areas – most notably economics –
have traditionally relied on models of human behaviour so reductionist and
rational that they leave no room for human understanding at all. So, spurned by
hyper-rational economists and accountants, we have reacted in one of two ways:
either we have clung hopelessly to the “overt rational persuasion” model of
advertising as a desperate attempt to make sense of what we do, or else we have
overcompensated and taken up allegiance with flower-arrangers, choreographers
and fashion-designers and claimed that this is simply a business that can only
be understood emotionally. Neither stance, to be frank, does us much good.
Like a raft for a drowning man, there have now emerged the sciences
of behavioural economics, neuroscience, informational economics and Darwinian
psychology. More surprising still, these once arcane fields have become
fashionable, spawning several best-selling books. And finally, since the credit
crunch has rather neatly proved that, behind their spreadsheets and rimless
glasses, a lot of apparently hyper-rational bankers are no less swayed by
Animal Spirits than a randy teenager, these studies have begun to gain
attention at the highest levels.
We could not ask for more, frankly. And the central strand of my IPA presidency is to make sure that the UK’s agencies don’t miss the opportunity this affords us.
So I implore you to come along to this upcoming event organised by the IPA to see what a scientific approach might bring us.
If
you need any more persuasion, Professor Miller is not only the author
of Spent, a Darwinian Psychologists approach to consumerism. He also
won a recent Ig-Nobel Prize for Economics for his paper ‘Ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by lap-dancers’.
See you there!
