Advertising in a digital age

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Is the future of advertising really all about data? One of the sector's largest firms, Publicis, has just bought digital marketing company Epsilon for $4.4 billion because, it says, advertising will become based on algorithms - and this will decide what we see on Facebook and Google. But Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of the Ogilvy advertising group and author of Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense, says that something is lost in the process when firms rely solely on big data for their campaigns. Two experts who worked on President Obama's campaign tell us what it takes to persuade and influence people; we hear from Dr Robert Cialdini, professor emeritus of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University, and Professor Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor and author of a book about conformity.