Marketing is fat-tailed, making hourly billing a fundamentally broken compensation model
Rory Sutherland · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · Dec 9, 2025 · at 59:23
Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK, explains to Shane Parrish why modern agency billing models based on hourly rates fail to reflect the power-law economics of creative ideas.
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“My argument is that marketing is actually fat-tailed. So is innovation, and R&D, pharmaceutical research, science, ok? In other words, five to 10% of what you do delivers perhaps a 110% of the value, and therefore paying people by the hour and demanding that every quantum of effort has to be matched to a quantum of value creation in some neat proportion”
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