Rory Sutherland's Blog

Rory Sutherland

This is not, as you may think, the demographic pyramid for a typical ad agency; it is in fact the demography of the Middle East. But in truth its bottom-heavy shape is just as problematic in both places.

When your entire population consists of sexually frustrated young men, it's liable to erupt unexpectedly in sudden outbursts and occasional violence. And the Middle East isn't much better either.

But we may be looking at the problem from the wrong end. The young men may be violent, irrational and unruly not because there are a lot of them. That need not be a problem at all. Perhaps instead the problem arises because there are proportionately too few old people around to restrain or direct them? "Actually, son, you and your mother have been talking, and we think you should give the suicide-bombing a miss until you've been to university."

Previously, when anyone has written about the shortage of the over-40s and over 50s in ad agencies, it has been spoken of as an individual tragedy. "Unfair..... shortsighted..... experience is valuable..... plenty of target audiences are over 50..... only a small part of advertising is youth advertising and so on." Perhaps this is entirely wrong. Perhaps it is a collective tragedy instead.

When I look back on 20 years at Ogilvy, my guess is that of all the stuff I have learned, perhaps 70% has been learned from people around ten years or more older than me. Drayton Bird, Steve Harrison, Randy Haunfelder, Reimer Thedens and several other people at Ogilvy were those without whom I might not have stuck it out at all. Elsewhere I've been fortunate enough to meet and learn from such as Jeremy Bullmore, Steve Henry, Gerry Moira, Stan Winston, Carla Hendra, Paul Feldwick and John Steel. (I would mention more women, too, but since I look ten years older than I really am, they probably would not thank me for it). And that's not including older people in production, typography, etc, where the same tendency applies.

Now this seems quite a startling example of the Pareto principle: if you gain 70% of what you learn from perhaps 4% of the people, patently older people have a value which goes far beyond what they bring to their individual work.

Why don't we appreciate this more? And keep more people after 40, even as they get a bit pricier?

Essentially there is a very simple explanation. Payment by the hour. This encourages you to reward people not in proportion to how valuable they are but how saleable they are to a client. Since a client with a job does not see any immediate benefit from the wider contribution of wiser heads to the culture of the agency, he won't pay for it.

Payment by the hour is absolutely detrimental to crating the kind of culture of learning David Ogilvy always wanted. It has eroded an old group-heads system, which helped knowledge to trickle down from one generation to the next. It ignores everything except short-term expediency. And it discounts entirely the wider contribution that an experienced head brings to all those around it.

I shouldn't give this tip away. But the single best ingredient to a successful pitch is a good 50:50 mix of age groups. The kind of mix of experience and enthusiasm which is often unacceptable to the client's procurement department once you win the business.