Expedia’s remarkably moving short film, “Find Your Understanding,” tells the true story of man named Artie Goldstein and his journey to accept his daughter Jill Goldstein’s marriage to another woman, Nikki Weiss. As the world waits for the Supreme Court decision on the Defense Against Marriage Act, millions have viewed this socially-conscious ad online. But in a poignant twist of fate, the film has done more than just open the hearts of its viewers. This piece — which was named one of TED’s Ads Worth Spreading — has played a significant role in helping Nikki secure parental rights of her son, Adler.

According to an article on Creativity Online, Nikki and Jill had agreed to participate in the film because they wanted to set a positive example for families struggling to come to terms with their gay children. And while the film shows footage of the couple’s wedding in 2010, the pair were not legally married under federal law. So when Jill gave birth on their second wedding anniversary, Nikki had to convince a social worker to allow her to adopt her own son in order to be legally considered as his parent.

The meeting with the social worker did not begin warmly. While taking Nikki’s fingerprints, she grilled Nikki about her relationship to Jill, “when we’ve known each other since we were children,” Nikki tells Creativity. But when the social worker asked the Weiss-Goldsteins about how their families felt about their relationship, they played her Expedia’s film. The social worker broke down in tears, and, as Nikki said, “I don’t think there were any more questions after that.” Nikki’s adoption of Adler becomes final on April 17^th.

Sadly, Mr. Goldstein will not be able to see the impact of his eloquent and touching soliloquy on his path to acceptance of his daughter’s marriage. He passed away in January. But Nikki said that the Expedia film remains as a “love letter” from her father in law.

William Gelner, creative director at 180 LA, the agency behind the film, spoke to the TED Blog about “Find Your Understanding.” He says that it is proof that there needn’t be a “dividing line between doing good and [doing] business. Too rarely do we realize that, as advertising people, we have the ability to truly influence culture for the better.”

Gelner’s words embrace the spirit of Ads Worth Spreading, which TED created to recognize and award advertising that truly resonates with consumers. By boldly standing up for its values and talking to its audience like people rather than robotic purchasers, Expedia has gained new respect and a community of supporters.

As Gelner tells us, “[This ad] opened hearts, minds, and hopefully soon, the law books on the issue of marriage equality.”

Get to know more about Jill and Nikki, whose wedding was originally documented for an episode of The Real L Word, in the videos below:

How did the idea for Ads Worth Spreading come about?

Ads Worth Spreading was born out of our search for compelling advertising. We want to feature campaigns that are as fascinating as our talks. All our ads run as post-roll (after the talks), and we want our viewers to choose to watch those ads because they’re interesting, engaging, funny or beautiful. It’s hard to find ads that good, but it shouldn’t be.

We launched Ads Worth Spreading in 2010 as a clarion call to brands that want to communicate authentic and interesting ideas to their consumers in the same way that TED wants to communicate with its audience — by sharing powerful ideas. We want to reward companies that have invested in creating advertising that values human attention and intelligence, and takes the time to tell a thought-provoking story.

Is advertising dead? In what ways do these concepts reflect the evolution of thinking in advertising?

No, advertising is far from dead. New media, new devices and more discerning audiences present challenges to the industry, but with every new challenge comes opportunity. At TED, we have benefited greatly from the intellectual evolution of the audience. Six years ago, the industry would not have predicted massive popularity for online talks on math, science, design and technology – but we recently reached one billion video views on TED.com alone.

As smart content becomes more popular, audiences expect more than ever from advertisers. Through Ads Worth Spreading, we’re seeing that people appreciate long-form advertising that is idea-driven, with meaningful storytelling and high production values. Viewers want to experience an emotional connection.

Read the full interview >>

Today, YouTube’s homepage spotlight features interviews with the creatives behind the campaigns that won TED’s Ads Worth Spreading —  an initiative to recognize and reward innovation, ingenuity and intelligence in advertising. The 10 winning ads were unveiled at TED2012 and representatives of each campaign attended the conference from Tunisia, Germany, Japan, Canada and the US.

The ads are incredibly different, from the hysterically funny “Your Man Reminder” for Rethink Breast Cancer to the meditatively beautiful “Xylophone” for NTT Docomo mobile phones. The diversity makes for fascinating interviews, as Mehdi Lamloum of Memac Ogilvy Tunisia talks about creating this amazing public stunt to encourage voting in the first democratic elections of his country, while William Charnock and Erin Lynch of R/GA discuss how the L’Oréal campaign they created challenges beauty conventions.

Watch all the ads and hear from the people behind each of these inspiring campaigns in this YouTube playlist.

The 10 winners of TED’s inaugural Ads Worth Spreading initiative have been announced from the stage. Selected from more than 1,000 submissions from around the world, they are some of the most creative, compelling and out-of-the-box communications of the past year. The winners are a truly diverse group — from major agencies to tiny boutiques to college students and non-profits, hailing from around the world.

In an earlier interview, Chris Anderson had this to say about the effort:

“We’re seeking to reverse the trend of ads being aggressively forced on users. We want to nurture ads so good you choose to watch – and share. On TED.com, ads run after our talks, not before. As well as avoiding the annoyance of interruption, this positioning means they can run longer than the TV-standard 30-seconds. And that’s the key — in 2-3 minutes, there’s more time to tell a story, share an idea, make an authentic human connection. These winning ads, many of them long-form, powerfully demonstrate these strengths. We think they represent an exciting new way for companies to engage with the world in the internet age.”

YouTube was a key supporter in this challenge, helping solicit and review submissions and showcasing the winning ads on the homepage of YouTube.com. AICP and NiceSpots graciously provided us an easy-to-use online judging system. We were also given support by Art Directors Club, The One Club/One Show, 4A’s, IAA, IAB and Contagious Magazine. All ads are being featured on TED.com from March 21 to March 27, and in an online Winners Gallery for a year. Visit it here to see all the winners and honorable mentions >>

Advertising whiz Cindy Gallop delivered one of the most talked-about talks at TED2009, so before it was posted the TED Blog had to snag her for an interview. Spirited as usual, she did not disappoint. Keep reading for answers on what people thought of MakeLoveNotPorn.com, Gallop’s bold position on feminism, her new project IfWeRanTheWorld and the story of her success.

What sort of feedback have you gotten on MakeLoveNotPorn.com? What do people think of it?

What MakeLoveNotPorn has in common with my other ventures is that when I encounter something that I feel very strongly about, I do something about it. Incidentally, that’s the whole point of my other venture IfWeRanTheWorld. It’s all about turning good intentions into action, being a very action-oriented person myself.

As I make clear in my talk, MakeLoveNotPorn is designed to address an issue that would never have crossed my mind if I had not encountered it within my personal life and specifically, because I date younger men who tend to be in their twenties, who are part of Generation Y. In this context, when I encountered this issue personally, I really felt that I wanted to do something about it. That is why I created MakeLoveNotPorn.com, and then welcomed the opportunity to launch it at TED.

I will say that I was extremely nervous before I gave my TEDTalk, and I was nervous for two reasons. The first is that I had absolutely no idea how MakeLoveNotPorn.com would be received. I talked to a few people about it in the process of conceiving the idea and then executing it, but predominantly friends of mine. It had received a generally very positive response, but I obviously still had no idea how the wider world would view it. The second reason I was nervous was I knew that in order to launch this I was going to have to really launch it, in the sense that I was going to have to be straightforward in order to have people understand why this was so necessary. I made a deliberate decision to be very frank in the language and the terminology that I used. This isn’t an issue that one can fence around if you want there to be complete clarity and understanding of what makelovenotporn.com is designed to address.

I was enormously gratified by the extraordinarily positive response I received at TED. The talk was obviously BoingBoing’ed immediately. Mark, from BoingBoing, told me it was the highlight of his first day at TED. The Twitter stream went mad. Robin Williams came up to me during the coffee break afterwards, told me how wonderful he thought it was and did an entire ten-minute comedy routine around it, which was terrific. But what I was really pleased about was that for the remaining three days of TED, loads of people came up to me and said it was fantastic. And they said it was fantastic in a number of contexts. Parents were particularly struck by it, and a lot of them said to me that they’d forwarded the site to their 16-year-old daughter or 18-year-old son. I think they particularly welcomed the fact that they could forward the link on without needing to have the conversation themselves, which is precisely why I began the site.

A number of people said that while they love the fact that TED covers science, art and technology, touching on the area of human relationships in the way that I did was really welcomed. A number of young people, and lots of the TED Fellows, said to me, “Oh my God! I love it. That is absolutely what I’ve encountered myself.” So, actually, the response at TED itself was absolutely wonderful in terms of having the audience understand and appreciate what this was intended to do.

Also, the site is very nascent at the moment. I put it up with no money. All you can do there is leave comments, send in your own porn world/real world ideas, and you can write to info@makelovenotporn.com. But judging by the comments that started appearing, I can see that MakeLoveNotPorn.com has achieved what I wanted it to, which is that it’s gotten to young people out in the mainstream, beyond the more TED intelligentsia-inclined audience. I’ve had a huge amount of submissions from people sending in their own porn world/real world ideas. These are very interesting to read, because while the vast majority of them are screamingly funny, some of them are also very serious and very heartfelt. One interesting thing, for me, was that I designed MakeLoveNotPorn to be deliberately gender-equal. It’s talking to men and women equally. A lot of men have submitted ideas that are much more about the male experience and the false expectations of men that porn engenders, which made me realize that when I do develop the site further, I will need to encompass the male experience more. I’ve got fantastic input there.

Also, MakeLoveNotPorn is very much a global concept. I work globally as a consultant, and I’ve encountered a great response to this from people in other countries. It’s absolutely reflected in the visitors to the site as well. I’m not actively promoting MakeLoveNotPorn at the moment because I don’t have the resources and I don’t have a lot to send people to yet. Nevertheless, I monitor it on Google and it pops up on French blogs, Chinese blogs, Greek blogs. One of the last emails I received was from a young guy in Morocco who wrote to me — by the way, when people write to info@makelovenotporn.com, they have no idea who they’re writing to and I identify as myself when I write back. Anyway, this young guy wrote to say, “Thank you so much. Young people in Morocco are like young people in the US, they are heavily influenced by porn. Now at last I can tell my friends how to make love to a girl, thanks to your wonderful website.” And I just love getting emails like that.

So, what’s next?

I have further plans for development and promotion based on finding far-sighted and broad-minded investors. For the time being I’m very pleased with the response that MakeLoveNotPorn has received, both in terms of overall recognition of the issue and in getting to exactly the audience I wanted to get to.

Your talk and this project seem to convey the words and ideas of a very empowered woman. Do you consider yourself to be a feminist?

I consider myself a rampant feminist. I deplore the shying away that can go on, within women, from the term “feminist.” I am, absolutely, all about being a feminist. My personal cause and platform, if you like, is women’s rights and women’s issues. In the context of my other web venture IfWeRanTheWorld (MakeLoveNotPorn is my secondary venture), if I ran the world, I would help the cause of women everywhere. Unfortunately, that embraces a huge spectrum of problems and issues, a very fractional amount of which I donate money to at the moment and which, when IfWeRanTheWorld is up and operational, I absolutely want to address myself.

Also, I like to describe myself as a proudly visible member of the most invisible segments of our society — older women. I’m 49. I make an active point of telling people how old I am, as often as possible, because I’d like to confound expectations of what an older woman should be, look and act like. I say that because it’s taken me 49 years to feel this good about myself. As women, from the moment we are born, everything around us, from a socio-cultural perspective, conspires to make us feel insecure about absolutely everything to do with ourselves — our looks, our bodies, whether people like us, whether boys like us. In many ways, an overarching wish of mine is that, if I ran the world I would give every woman the confidence that she deserves, to feel empowered to live her life the way she wants to live it. The fact is that girls are massively constrained in other parts of the world, but are constrained in First World countries as well. That desire infuses an awful lot of what I do.

I absolutely get involved in women-specific areas within my industry. I work with Advertising Women of New York, with Girls in Tech. I provide advice and help on a regular basis to many, many women on their personal lives, career, business ventures, particularly younger women who, very flatteringly, see me as a role model. I do everything I can to help them. That is something that I feel very strongly about. I’m a rampant feminist and proud to call myself a feminist.

READ MORE: Gallop shares her secret to self-confidence, details her new project IfWeRanTheWorld, and gives the story of her evolution from lit major to top ad exec.On the topic of feminism, you seem very comfortable as a woman who talks about having a sex life, without being ashamed of that at all. What did you have to overcome psychologically and socially to get to that point?

That’s a very interesting question. I’ve never really analyzed that, but I think I would say, funnily enough, that where I’m at today, personally has a lot to do with the industry I’ve grown up in professionally, and that is advertising. The single best lesson that I’ve ever learnt was born out of the advertising industry: When you identify what your personal brand stands for, when you know what you believe in, what you value, what your personal philosophy of life is, it makes life so much easier. Life will still throw at you all the crap it always does, but you know exactly how to respond to it in any given situation, in a way that is true to you. And that has a tremendous role to play in building self-belief, self-empowerment and self-confidence.

I’ve done a lot of talks and given a lot of business advice on the future of advertising and marketing, and something that I say to people is that the new marketing reality today is complete transparency. Particularly with the Internet, everything that brands and companies do today is in the public domain. When I talk to brand marketers who are nervous about this, I say, “Interestingly, the answer to that is the same answer as it is for a person: When you have a very strong sense of who you are and what you stand for, and you always act from and operate on that basis, you have nothing to worry about in terms of wherever people encounter you, because you are simply being completely honest.” Authenticity, integrity, honesty means you don’t have to worry about what people think of you, because you are being true to yourself. It’s true of brands, and it’s true of people.

So, bizarrely enough, where I’ve arrived at personally has something to do with where I’ve come from professionally. I find that life’s so much easier when you’re straightforward and say, “Here I am. Take me as you find me. Are you with me, or are you not?” If you’re not, that’s fine. There will be enough people who are.

What about your current project, IfWeRanTheWorld. What is it all about, and where do you see it going?

First, I’d like to explain where the concept came from. It’s an idea that I had, kind of accidentally, two and a half years ago. When I had it, I just thought, “This is one of those ideas I have to make happen or die trying.” It comes out of two places. It comes out of the kind of person that I am and it comes out of the industry I work in. When I talk about the kind of person that I am, what I mean is that I’m someone who is enormously action-oriented. I’m all about making things happen, totally believe in being the change you want to see, and quite frankly, have a very low tolerance level for people who whinge and whine about stuff and never do anything to change it.

So, it was coming out of all that that I found myself thinking that arguably, the single biggest pool of untapped natural resource in this world is human good intentions that never translate into action. Even though I talk about myself as being action-oriented, I can be just as guilty of this as anybody else. After reading The New York Times, I’ll go, “Oh my God. That’s terrible. I must do something about that.” I’ll turn the page, and the moment’s gone. The intention was absolutely there, but it never got acted on. So I found myself thinking, if you could find a way to take all those good intentions that all of us have on a daily basis and somehow find a way to turn them, at the moment of intention, into action, you would then unleash a force of energy and power that could do extraordinary things in the world.

That was one half of my thinking, and the other half of my thinking was, it actually came out of 24 years working in marketing, brand-building and advertising. I happen to know there is another equally large, equally powerful, untapped resource, which is corporate good intentions. There is no shortage of companies, both large and small, who know that in order to earn the right to do business in the world today, they have to be “corporately socially responsible,” often have very large budgets dedicated to CSR, employ whole teams of people whose sole purpose in life is to find effective ways to spend this budget, but who nevertheless waste them taking out full-page ads in The Wall Street Journal saying, “Look how green we are,” that nobody reads. They are missing the opportunity of allowing their CSR agenda to support their business objective in a way that proves that you can do good and make money simultaneously. I’m trying to bring those two things together — human good intentions and corporate good intentions — and to transform them, collectively, into shared action and shared objectives that will produce shared, mutually beneficial end results. That’s the thinking behind IfWeRanTheWorld.

When I decided to do this, I was very aware, coming from the ad industry, that it’s never just what you do, it’s the way that you do it. And I’m very conscious of the fact that, sadly, for a lot of people and businesses, the idea of doing good is inherently very, very boring. When you go to the homepage of many a social endeavor or nonprofit, sadly, you are all too often met with an instant yawn factor, a part of the worthy but dull syndrome. Before you do anything, you feel, “Oh my God. I’m half-asleep already.” I’m trying to make doing good sexy as hell. Everything about IfWeRanTheWorld is crafted to ultimately achieve that effect. It’ll be launching in January 2010, which I think is perfect. January is always the month of good intentions — new year, new start.

You’ve really got a lot going on. How did you manage to get to this point — to move from English literature Oxford student to advertising force?

Without any conscious thought whatsoever. I actually fell very madly in love with theater at Oxford. It’s got a very thriving student drama scene. I wrote, I acted, I directed, I stage-managed and I essentially decided that all I wanted to do was work in theater for the rest of my life. I knew I wasn’t good enough to be an actress or a director, but one of the things that I always enjoyed doing at Oxford was selling shows. I used to design theater posters. I would do the publicity and information for them, and so I actually went into theater as a publicity and marketing officer for several theaters in the UK.

Then I started getting tired of the fact that I was working every hour God gave me, and earning chicken feed, which is what happens in theater. At that time, I was the marketing officer for the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, and part of my job was giving talks on the theater. So I gave a talk one afternoon to a group of women, and after the talk, one of them came up to me and she said, “Young lady, you could sell a fridge to an Eskimo.” And I thought, “Right. The universe has spoken. I think it’s time to sell out to the establishment and get into advertising.”

So I did. I applied to a very large number of ad agencies, because it wasn’t so easy to get into, particularly with no experience. I actually ended up going right back to the beginning again, and getting a job as an entry-level graduate trainee recruit at an ad agency in London. I worked at several advertising agencies. By the way, after working as an impoverished theater person, when I joined this agency in London, in the heyday of the ’80s, in the first month there I drank more champagne than I had in my entire life to date. I thought, “This is the industry for me!”

In ’89, I joined BBH in London. I realized when I joined them that this was a very special agency, but I had no idea how big they would be. First, I ran several pieces of big business for them out of London — Coca-Cola, Ray-Ban, Polaroid. In 1996, I moved to Singapore to help start and run BBH Asia Pacific, and worked as the number two person there. Then in 1998, I got my dream job, which I had put in a request for, which was to come here to New York and start BBH US. It literally began as me in a room with a phone, on my own, starting up an ad agency in the world’s toughest advertising marketplace. And my employee number two, after me, and my executive creative director, Ty Montague, who is now the chief creative officer at JWT, he had a great phrase in the early years. Whenever anybody asked us, “How’s it going?” he’d reply, “We’re having hard fun.” And that’s exactly what it was like starting up an agency in New York — hard fun. But it went very well and it was enormous fun running BBH here.

When I said earlier that I’d done all this with no thought whatsoever, in a way that’s deliberate. Very early on, I was invited to a big ad industry event. I remember looking around that hall, which was full of tables of all the big American agencies — JWT, Y&R, Grey, McCann — and I was sitting there, it was about three months after I’d moved to New York, we had a staff of about five, and I thought, “If I stop to think about what I’m trying to do here, which is launch the BBH brand into the American marketplace, if I look around at the advertising behemoths that dominate the marketplace, I’ll get so frightened, I’ll never do it.” So I thought I’d better not.

I used to say to my employees, “Our vision for BBH US is that we’re going to be the best agency in America.” Then I would think that if McCann could hear us, they’d be rolling around the floor in hysterics, laughing. But one should always have a big vision, and one should always strive to achieve it.

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/4A

Watch John Gerzema’s talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ TEDTalks.

The TED Blog caught up with ad man Rory Sutherland the evening before we posted his TEDTalk. Drawing on the work of behavioral economists, Nobel Prize winners and others, he talked at length about his personal philosophy of Advertarianism, about President Obama and the healthcare debate, and even threw in some analysis on the future of media use and advertising. Not bad, considering it was well past bedtime in the UK.

You call yourself an “Advertarian.” Would you like to explain what that means?

Now, there’s a thought experiment that behavioral economists perform, one in which a man invents a brilliant new way for scanning X-rays — so you can do cancer scans and X-rays at one tenth of the previous cost and at twice the speed — and everybody heralds him as a hero. Then, it’s revealed that there isn’t any clever technology. All he does is scan the X-rays and then email them off to the Philippines, where highly trained, low-cost employees do the actual scanning of the X-rays manually, just as before, only at one tenth of the salary. And the argument that’s used by economists is that people are absolutely scandalized by this, everyone thinks is this absolutely outrageous, and “What a terrible man!” Yet, bizarrely, the effects are identical. The effect of offshoring to a low-wage economy is the same as a technological innovation. Indistinguishable. You might even argue that the second course is better, at least if you’re a Filipino in need of a reasonably well-paid job. But, interestingly, we judge them morally on a very different level. We’re very subjective about that, and the means and the intentionality make a big difference.

And I have a parallel example, where I say, “Imagine there’s a device that costs about 50p per household, per year, and if you install it in your house, it decreases the chance of a house fire by 30 percent.” And everybody goes, “That’s an absolutely brilliant idea. I want to buy one of those. And, actually, I think the government should pay for it and they should issue one to all households.” But, it’s not technically a device: it’s actually a TV commercial. To run the ad costs about 50p per household, per year, and it actually decreases the likelihood of household fires by 30 percent. There is a TV commercial that’s had precisely that effect. And then people go, “No, that’s not quite the same.” And the question you have to ask is, “Why is it not the same?” In other words, why do we regard solutions that involve, to a small extent, tampering with our heads or just supplying information or supplying persuasion … why do we regard those solutions as lesser value than those that involve technology, for example?

It’s not that marketing-driven or advertising-led solutions can solve everything. That’s absolutely not true. What seems strange to me, though, is that people don’t at least try them first. Instead, governments try to solve their problems by compulsion. My view is that we should try and solve the problem by persuasion, and if that fails we can try compulsion or harder-level nudging. For this reason, I think the book Nudge is one of the most important books of the last five to ten years.

One of the small successes of my TEDTalk is that it’s now Conservative Party policy to spend no more money on speed cameras, but to spend the money on those vehicle-activated signs instead. So, I’ve had a small amount of advertarian success, with at least the prospective next government here in Britain. I’m purely philosophical about this. I’m not an advertarian in the sense that I believe that all problems can be solved this way. But, I think it’s best just to try.

Technology makes for easier persuasion and nudging — what B.J. Fogg at Stanford calls persuasive technology — and makes it far more potent. So, the British government’s Central Office of Information, they’ve said, “Look we’ve tried advertising with seatbelts for years. It didn’t really work. And so, we made it illegal not to wear a seatbelt and everybody wore one.” It’s interesting, of course, that at the time when we made it compulsory to wear seatbelts, there wasn’t the technology cheaply available to make a car go “bing” for 60 seconds, or even indefinitely, if you didn’t put your seatbelt on. Now, I would argue that making it a legal requirement that all new cars go “bing” for 90 seconds if you don’t put your seatbelt on when you drive off is a nudge, but it’s not really an infringement of liberties.

Senior people in government spend years getting their hands on very large budgets with which they want to do very big things, and quite often there’s a disproportionality, as the things that make an enormous difference are actually quite trivial. For example, Terminal 5 at Heathrow is magnificent. As a piece of architecture, it’s fabulous. But, the signage is dreadful. It’s a Kafka-esque nightmare of really appalling directions and confusion.

All large organizations need a Director of Trivia or a Director of Detail — a very senior person with a large budget and great powers, but whose job is actually to take care of little irritants. Most board directors and government ministers, their sense of self-aggrandizement is too great for them to actually get involved here. You haven’t spent all those years becoming a government minister to improve form design, yet what Nudge would say is that if you want people to follow your policy, designing really attractive forms and interfaces is probably a better way of achieving your end than spending loads of time legislating or creating expensive incentives. The world needs people going around and sorting out little interface issues. If pelican crossings (crosswalks) had “Cancel” buttons, they would be more efficient. The thing is, you press the button and then realize there’s a gap in the traffic, you jaywalk across, and then all the cars have to stop for no one to cross the street. All you need there is a simple “Cancel” button so that if you decide to make a run for it you don’t stop all the traffic. And there are hundreds more little problems like these that are unnecessary irritants in our daily lives.

The Advertarian philosophy doesn’t solve all this; it’s just a little thing I made up. But, I do think that you should always try to solve a problem first through voluntary means or persuasive means before resorting to heavy-handed compulsion.

When you bring up advertising and government, the first thing that comes to mind is President Obama’s campaign last year. What did you think of his campaigning style, as well as what he’s doing in government right now? Is there anything you think he should be doing differently?

It’s very interesting. I think he ran a brilliant campaign using both social media and mass media. It’s actually a much more conventional advertising campaign than a lot of people have said. There was an enormous amount of money spent on advertising. And, it was interesting that to some extent he portrayed himself as the underdog, even though he was better funded than anyone. He played that off very cleverly. Because he wasn’t a long-time politician, he could play this game of “little old me” when actually, he had bucketloads of money to campaign with.

What’s peculiar in this case is that he’s failed to take the American people with him on health reform in the way that he undoubtedly co-opted them and created a popular movement around his election campaign. It must be remembered that, in the United States, there are immensely powerful lobby groups who weren’t in action against his election in the same way.

But, Obama did have the amazing effect of getting the British to rise up in defense of the National Health Service. The British are mostly critical of the health service and spend a lot of time complaining about it, but when various things came out in the United States more or less suggesting that we have committee meetings to decide whether you die or not, people found that such a ridiculous misrepresentation of the situation that they leapt to the defense of the system.

Now, just bear in mind that by European standards I’m quite right wing. Not by American standards, but by European standards I’m thought to be quite libertarian and quite keen on free-market solutions. But, there is a simple fact that, strangely, you can’t point out to Americans, which is that when you go to Canada, it’s not like everybody’s dying. They pay vastly less for prescription drugs, because they’re purchased centrally.

Incidentally, what no one actually says is that the United States spends an insane amount of money on health. A brutally statistical discovery, as found by the statistician Robin Hanson, claims that, above a certain level of expenditure, there is no correlation between money spent on healthcare and longevity. So, actually, when you spend above a certain amount per person on health, longevity doesn’t actually improve. And, Hanson’s theory is that excessive intervention by medicine outweighs the benefits of overfunding.

Most people think that the more you spend on healthcare, the better your healthcare is, but it’s not true. Now, it’s not that every heart surgeon is going, “Oh yes, a couple more of these heart operations and I’ll be able to pay for a yacht.” Rather, if you’ve spent 40 years practicing heart surgery and becoming a brilliant heart surgeon, you are unusually biased towards seeing solutions in heart surgery, just as legislators are overly biased to seeing solutions in legislation and people who are engineers are overly biased to seeing the solutions to the world’s ills lying in engineering. And so, overmedication and excessive intervention by doctors in the United States is probably a downside of how much money is poured into healthcare. The bias to intervention is always there in a case where you can either do nothing or do something. People always prefer something. The doctor’s recommendation of “Actually, I’d just leave it. It’ll probably go away,” is never one with which people are comfortable.

However, the inordinate amount of money spent on healthcare in the United States has enormous spillover benefit for other countries. The research and pharmaceutical development that’s funded by the large percentage of GDP devoted to US healthcare ultimately benefits the rest of the world enormously. So, in some ways, as a Brit, I would be quite keen for the United States to carry on with its current barking level of health expenditure.

The fundamental problem that Obama has in this — and the British also had this for the previous 100 years — is that when you’re top dog nation, you don’t think that anything could be better anywhere else. I mean, if France had come to us and said, “Actually, you ought to drink wine and not beer,” we would never have accepted that. The very idea comes across as unpatriotic. I’ve met Americans who themselves are quite chippy about the United States, but if you ever go and actually say, “I think your restrictions on drinking out-of-doors are a bit silly,” they get quite jumpy about it. In truth, there are 50 million Italians who sit outside drinking wine, in the open air, and their incidence of alcoholism is probably lower than the US.

I think Paul Romer has the answer, in truth. I thought Paul Romer’s speech at TED was actually magnificent. The idea of charter cities: absolutely fascinating. To change something at a national level is impossible. What you need to do is create cities that operate on new models and new institutions, and trial the new thing at that scale and then, effectively, let it spread outwards. That’s an interesting question, whether you should try it state by state in some form.

Is your advice to Obama that he should sit and have a talk with Paul Romer?

Yes, exactly that. I think so.

It’s a fundamental question about making change happen. In truth, much as people in central government love to issue strategy because it’s what they’re there for, a lot of important change happens from the bottom up. Where Britain’s conservatives have been quite good is in looking round the world for good ideas, in the sense that there are some very good Swedish ideas on education involving starting your own school that they’re currently looking at.

READ MORE: Rory Sutherland explains 360 degree branding, why the distance the technology can put between us is actually useful and talks Mad MenAssociated with your name is the phrase “360 degree branding.” What is that exactly? What makes a campaign or an approach 360 degree?

I don’t think it’s something you can ever actually say, “OK, right. Mission accomplished.” I think it’s a vector, a direction, an aspiration. What it really understands is that there was a period of some mass media dominance, particularly with your advertising package groups, where the brand resided in the decisions you made on packaging, distribution and price, and mass advertising. If you had more or less covered those bases, you could say, “Well, a brand was created. Job done.” Of course, more and more brands now are highly experiential, and to some extent brands which were once considered product brands are now very much service brands.

Dave Ogilvy was a very early person to understand this. He was a massive enthusiast of, for example, direct marketing, long before other advertising people were, and he was also a very early person to spot the significance of brand value and long-term brand building as a role of advertisers.

What happens now, in a different media world, is we take our cues from far, far more diverse sources. One interesting perspective that obviously involves social media is that to some extent you might say that recommendation is the new promotion. Many people seeking reassurance on making a purchase decision will look to their peer group to provide it, often more than they might look to advertising. In some cases, people prefer a peer group even to experts. Even though Amazon pays for professional book reviews and provides them right next to the book, 80 percent of people prefer to read the reviews written by ordinary book readers. And maybe they just think that the average buyer of this book is more likely to reflect their tastes than a professional writing for the New York Review of Books — not a totally insane assumption, by the way.

So, brand cues can be anywhere, as well as the heuristics people use. For example, there is an advertising heuristic, which is a fairly good rule of thumb, that advertised brands are of a higher quality than unadvertised brands. Two things: You’re unlikely to spend an awful lot of money promoting a product that isn’t actually much good — it’s said that advertising a bad product merely speeds its decline in many ways. And, secondly, the assumption that someone who invests in a long-term reputation, through building a brand, is far less likely to risk that reputation by producing a crappy car or useless DVD player than someone you’ve never heard of before. And this applies to everything. Nearly all transactions are based on asymmetrical information. It’s the same in the case of investing in a bank. What is there to reassure me that this guy isn’t going to disappear with my money? One of the signals that banks traditionally use is architecture. They build a big bank branch, with marble pillars and an impression of permanence.

There was a Nobel Prize won, by I think Joseph Stiglitz, on the concept of “signaling,” which is what people do in markets where there’s a lot information asymmetry. What is it that businesses do to create enough trust that they can actually sell what it is that they’re selling? Advertising is one of those, recommendation through social media is another one, design is probably another, as is the quality of your online interface. There are a lot of cues that people take when deciding whether to trust a brand and whether to respect it, and 360 is just the acknowledgment that it’s not enough for an advertising agency to say, “We’ve done your advertising. Your packaging looks quite good. So, it’s a slam dunk, job done, we’re off to the races.”

One of the things you notice now, because brands can be experienced in more and more ways, is that the 360 idea is used to regard every interaction and point of contact as a brand-building opportunity. The extent to which social media, in some categories, may be almost a substitute for advertising in creating trust and reputation, is an important one. In some categories, it’s less important, but there are some high engagement categories such as buying a digital camera. It’s something to look for, certainly.

Following up on that, there’s this new landscape of social media rising. Is there a form or type of social media where you see opportunity, growth and sustainability in the face of the doubts that are being thrown at it?

I think the first thing to say is that it isn’t new. It isn’t even as new as the Internet. Usenet was there long before the web was there, and the Internet was social long before it was ever 1.0. And, of course, ordinary word of mouth and recommendation has played an enormous part in decisions going back hundreds of years. So, reputation as a form of public opinion is not new.

What is new about today’s digital form is that it is amplified, it hangs around for much longer, it becomes searchable. The other thing which is vital about new digital media is that they work not only because they bring us together, but also because they allow us to interact at arm’s length. I have an interesting example of this. If you want to make a railway journey in Europe, there’s a man, he’s a complete railway enthusiast — you probably don’t want to spend a week in a closed room with him. But he’s the man behind Seat61.com, which is a website entirely about how to make journey through Europe by train and which could be immeasurably helpful to you.

Face-to-face communication is time-consuming, it requires a lot of effort, and it also brings with it a degree of social awkwardness. On the web, people can actually engage in profitable exchange of information and goods at arm’s length. There’s an awful lot of the web that works, not because it brings us close, but because it preserves a kind of distance between us. I buy things from people on eBay, I don’t actually want to visit their home, meet their children or have coffee with them, but I’m very happy to buy what they have to sell. And the web enables us to actually engage with other people at a level of closeness or distance of our own choosing. That, in itself, is hugely significant.

We often use communication technologies to preserve distance, and the top example is text messaging. It’s, in a weird way, a way we’ve invented of not speaking to each other. There are the logical benefits to it. For example, I don’t have to start a text message with 65 words of pleasantries, which you do when you make a phone call. We prefer this, and channel preference to certain forms of engagement is unbelievably strong For example, if you invite live feedback on your service by text message, a few things happen. One, you get a degree of frankness and immediacy of response that you don’t get if you ask people to fill in a survey three weeks after they’ve taken a flight. And, interestingly, you get hugely more praise. People don’t like praising staff face-to-face because it might freak them out a bit, or they may think you’re hitting on them or something like that. But, when they can praise staff by text message, with a degree of distance, people do. One of the things that a company in Britain called Fizzback has discovered is that when you offer these SMS feedback channels, at say coffee shops, the amount of positive feedback that comes in actually outweighs the amount of criticism. With most other ways of seeking comment, you get a ton of criticism and not much praise, which is kind of disheartening for the staff.

I’m obsessed by that. I mean, an awful lot of the time, personal service is actually a pain in the ass. A lot of hotels actually think that they’re providing a wonderful service by having a desk where you can go and check in and give your credit card and collect your key, someone carries your bag up to your room and isn’t that all wonderful? In truth, by the time I’ve arrived on a long flight, I actually want to collect my key from an automated machine and go straight to the room without any human intervention at all. Low-cost airlines have shown that. The travel agent was once thought of as this wonderful added value in selling travel, only to discover that actually, you give people a screen with 20 prices on it and let them choose for themselves, with a strong impression of control, they’d rather not have a person involved.

Also, if you’re on Expedia or you’re on easyJet, you can interrogate your possible choices to a degree which, if performed face-to-face, would make you an asshole. If I spent three hours on the phone with a travel agent, and after three hours, I was saying, “And would it be 20p cheaper if I went on Wednesday?” unless I was an unbelievably thick-skinned individual, I’d be conscious of the fact that the guy was thinking, “This guy is a real pain.” Now, when I interact online, I can be as much of a pain as I like. I can be the world’s most-demanding, world’s worst customer and there’ s no one to mind.

I think a lot of people misunderstand the potential for these technologies, the idea of persuasive technology and that the interfaces we choose have an inordinate effect over the choices we make. And I think that’s the essential point of Nudge, that we’re more affected in our decisions by the interface and the architecture in which we choose than we are by the long-term consequences of the decisions we make.

The type of advertising that seems to freak people out the most at the moment seems to be the highly-targeted advertisements on the Internet, through Google Ads or Gmail, that take information you’ve entered at some point and tailor ads to you. Do you see this as simply an invasive form of advertising or do you see an upside to it?

If you’re trying to build a brand, rather than make a quick sale, then you have to be sensitive to those nuances. There’s a famous, awful case in Google Mail where someone was arranging the return of a body of a relative who’d died in a scuba diving accident, and in the course of their emails being sent and received, ads for scuba diving holidays started appearing alongside the emails. This is the sort of thing, which unfortunately, isn’t going to go away.

It’s important to recognize that there are huge advantages to this stuff. One of them is that it makes markets much more competitive and it removes barriers to entry to small players. The fact that they can actually reach people, both by person and by moment very efficiently is game-changing. If you were operating a niche before behavioral targeting came along, it was prohibitively expensive to try and reach your target audience with any real effectiveness. Mass media was closed to you for being too expensive, so what did you do? One alternative solution, I suppose, is personal referral, which of course is a form of behavioral targeting but which involves people. So, if I send you an offer and say, “Give this offer to the one person in your hundred friends who you think will enjoy it the most,” that’s an ingenious way of outsourcing the targeting of advertising to a person. That’s a human-powered alternative.

However, people are very strange with what they mind, because they’ll happily go to Google and type in “goat sex,” thereby revealing to Google an extraordinary deep and personal perversion, and seem to be completely unconcerned about doing this. But, when they spend an afternoon looking at hats online and they’re shown ads for hats, they get terribly offended. So people’s behavior isn’t completely consistent. It’s a social construct. Germany’s obsession with this is far, far greater than in the United States, for example. About 60 percent of Germans surf the web with cookies switched off. There’s a real obsession with anonymity and privacy there. The UK, as is usually the case, sit in a trans-Atlantic middle ground.

Of course, the obsession with privacy in Germany means that advertising is far less effective, therefore banner advertisements are worth very little, therefore there’s no way for content to actually fund itself. So, you may have a case where the economic barrier to start an online newspaper in Germany is far greater than it is in the United States, for example. Everybody who comes to your German online newspaper, you know nothing about them, you can only serve them generic advertising, making it worth almost zero. So, by being obsessed with privacy, you are making your online experience worse. It has to be recognized that the preservation of privacy does come at a cost.

As an ad man, do you watch Mad Men?

Yes, I do!

What do you think of it?

To some extent, Mad Men is male revenge for being made to watch Sex and the City for all those years. It’s the Y chromosome fighting back after so many years of watching women debate handbags. And so, the extraordinary machismo, the boozyness, the sexism, the hardcore smoking that goes on is undoubtedly a bit of a counterblast to the things that men have been made to sit through.

It’s a fantastically made drama, brilliant drama, spectacular period piece. If you talk to advertising people who remember the era, some of them say it was like that and some of them say it was nothing like that. Some of that stuff certainly happened, the smoking and, to some extent, the alcohol consumption are fairly accurate of the period in general, not just in advertising.

It’s spectacularly enjoyable and doesn’t do us any harm as an industry. I sometimes wonder if it’s not a bad idea to occasionally look a bit evil, given the alternative of looking ineffectual.

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