Rory Sutherland’s secret crush on Ronald Reagan

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One thing that often surprises people is my adoration of Ronald Reagan. Part of my admiration is simply for his breadth – for it seems to me he was somewhere on the scale between “pretty good” and “great” at about ten different things: actor, baseball commentator, radio announcer, television star, letter writer, comedian, governor, president. That suggests someone far more unusual in statistical terms than people who are simply good at one thing. After all, by definition, if you take any one talent there will be someone who is better at it than anyone else. Things only get interesting in terms of probability when that someone is good at something else as well. Astonishingly there are 12 people who have played for England at both Cricket and Soccer – while one of Britain’s most recent Prime ministers was also a first-class liar.

Another person who does well on this score is the less well know Eric Maschwitz. The Birmingham-born son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, he ended up as Head of Light Entertainment at the BBC. For most people this would be achievement enough, but in an earlier life he had written the lyrics to songs such as Goodnight Vienna, A Nightingale sang in Berkeley Square and These Foolish Things, I imagine this background came in handy when he was in television, since arguments with any creative staff could be settled with the simple “And how many of the greatest song lyrics of the 20th Century did you write, exactly?”

These Foolish Things is one of those remarkable songs where the lyrics inarguably make as large a contribution to a song’s greatness as its tune or its arrangement. There are a few songs where this is undoubtedly true (Anything Goes, co-written by P. G. Wodehouse is certainly one such, as is quite a bit of Bob Dylan and a good deal of rap). But for every instance where the lyrics are integral to a song’s genius there are many more where they are not. I don’t see Professors of English in the 22nd Century being much troubled by Woolly Bully, Duke of Earl or Louie Louie, for instance.

It would be fun here – and very tempting – to get into a long debate about the relative importance of lyrics, music, and execution (and how good would Ring of Fire have been without the Mexican horns?) But I don’t think we should. Because, ultimately, we are here dealing with complex systems where the importance of each element simply cannot be assessed in isolation from the other two. All you can say, I think, is that the relationship at its best is complementary and multiplicative – and perhaps that mediocre lyrics might be less fatal to greatness than mediocrity in the other two areas.

The constituent parts of good advertising are just the same. Any ad consists of various components whose individual value is unknowable in isolation. The relative role of art and copy. The interplay between conception and execution. The relationship between what you say and how you say it; reason and emotion; the proposition versus the execution. Here again the interdependencies make it impossible to assess one component in the absence of the others.

By and large, the music industry knows this and hence (Berry Gordy’s Motown was one exception) it usually does not usually attempt to impose any strict process or routine to the act of creation. Indeed, counter to all we have heard about division of labour, the best singers and the best songwriters are often singer-songwriters.

Sadly clients and their procurement departments are rarely blessed with this Negative Capability* – of allowing work to be created in a non-linear black-box process. As a result, the work of agencies suffers. While nobody would stipulate that you can only create a good song by writing the lyrics first, the advertising approval process now requires us to judge a proposition in advance of executing it. This is absurd. Just as the words to Woolly Bully look pretty dismal until expressed in music, so the proposition to the first Economist poster “Don’t read this magazine and you’ll be a loser” is pretty dire in the absence of a joke.

The worst effect of all this artificial compartmentalisation is to create false dichotomies in advertising – where one activity is mistakenly seen as taking place at the expense of another. This is very much how I felt reading the debate at The Marketing Society blog between Mark Sherrington and Paul Feldwick, between a sceptical view of internet marketing and an enthusiastic one.

Surely they are both right. Internet marketing is immensely valuable. And, because of (not despite) that, classical mass marketing is more important than ever.

The two activities are complementary. If the web provides people with more opportunities to buy a product, then TV ads for that product suddenly become more effective not less. Where’s the conflict?

Surely the internet no more diminishes the importance of great mass marketing or great brands than a great lyric diminishes the importance of a great tunesmith. The idea that one competes with the other is like suggesting the Heathrow Express competes with British Airways.

• Thanks to David Meikle of Salt for introducing me to the incredibly useful concept of Negative Capability, which he ingeniously borrowed from Keats.

This article appears in the latest edition of Market Leader, The Marketing Society’s quarterly journal.