Oh, Snapshot.
Call it more evidence of a deepening deficit in critical thinking, or maybe we’ve gotten too freaking frightened about acting on instinct and experience. But increasingly, The Reductionist keeps colliding with circumstances where otherwise perfectly savvy people are willing to buy a prediction, any prediction, as long as it comes packaged as “data-driven.”
The unoriginal sin: no matter how frequent the disappointment, or bloody the nose, we persist in believing we can effectively anticipate what’s ahead based on a snapshot of right now—which is all that even most advanced investigative tool can deliver. And yes, I’m looking at you, surveys, focus groups, multi-variant tests, consumer journey-mapping, attribution models; the whole kit and kaboodle of the far-richer-than-thee-and-me industrial analytics complex.
As it happens IRL, the inevitable time that passes between collection, processing, evaluation, and actual use makes data an unavoidably lagging indicator. And while trendlines have value, it’s always useful to recall that “past performance is no guarantee of future results” is sitting there, smirking, on the other side of the teeter-totter.
Personally speaking, it’s my sense we’d all be hella smarter, even happier, if we paid more attention to John Lennon’s caveat that “life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” Not that there’s any money in that—be damned hard to make bank as a marketing genius with PowerPoint slides quoting Yodaisms like “the future it is, hard to predict.”
Ergo, we wind up with a marketing landscape littered by the rotting carcasses of what the data snapshot portrayed as “unstoppable” platforms, “irresistible” technologies, and “irreversible” changes in media. See also, Vines, YikYak, Google Glasses, Google Plus, Windows 6 and Windows Mobile, New Coke, and, most ironic of all, the annual doom-saying about the impending death of linear television.
But rather than dwell on hubris and history, let’s gently tap —make that slam—the brake pedal to the floorboard and hang a sharp left in the direction of a way to think about data that might offer something more thoughtful than paint-by-numbers.
The suggestion: quantified information is most useful when it leads to an advertising insight, a “deeper understanding,” of very specific things that illustrate relevance. Relevance, in turn, gives us a sense of what’s meaningfully related to the audience—what they do (versus what they say they do), how and when they do it, and, more and more urgent in the screaming Cat 5 hurricane that is marketing, where it happens.
This is crucially different, in church and not just pew, from an advertising idea, even though the two terms are often unforgivably conflated. Insight is passive, idea is active; insight is descriptive; idea is persuasive; insight can be predictive, ideas have to be projective. Far from tomato/tomahto, baby, insight is foundational potato, idea is aspirational caviar and I’ll have two scoops, please.
Going even further: with pure invention and the wind at your back, you can create world-shaking and hall-of-fame making without a lick of insight, except “people read what interest them” (see The Book of Gossage and ideas like “pink air”). Try to pull off the reverse trick—insight without idea—and you wind up with ads for mesothelioma (“if you have it, get our free book”), hemorrhoid ointment (“if you have it, get our tube”), Medicare supplements (“if you have it, you’ll get more”) and ED (“if you have it, get our pill” in the US; the Canadians did brilliant idea-based ads for Viagra back in the day).
The mistake is thinking that just because you advance something that links to a known attribute of your audience, they will connect with your creative. They won’t, any more than staring at a data-derived snapshot, always a relic of the past, will connect you to the roadmap that will lead to success.