Sutherland: Tech Vendors Captured Finance Departments With Self-Serving Marketing Metrics
Rory Sutherland · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · Dec 9, 2025 · at 43:19
Advertising executive Rory Sutherland explains 'technoplasmosis', critiquing how software vendors and consultants pushed finance teams toward short-term digital metrics that benefit vendor sales.
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“What has happened is that in marketing, for example, the tech companies, the consulting firms that sell stacks, and I owe a lot of this to a guy called Adel Borky, very interesting, self-taught Libyan marketing writer, former boxer, Anil Borky, and I coined the phrase technoplasmosis by analogy with toxoplasmosis, which is tech people and consultants have taken over the finance department so that the marketing metrics the finance department has faith in and demands from marketing are not those metrics which are most conducive to building brand and customer value over time. They're the metrics which are most conducive to selling tech solutions to the companies.”
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