RETROWURST: My finest hour? January 1994

 I’m not sure what my finest hour was in my brand and advertising career (or maybe it’s yet to come, ha, ha!). But when it comes to Market Research, which is where I started out, I think it has to be this one.

It wasn’t an hour, more like 72 of them, not to mention all the conceptualisation, preparation and follow-up. Back in January 1994, I convened the MRS course on Advertising Research. 6 speakers, and delegates from client companies, market research, advertising and media agencies. 

You can see from the biography I submitted that I wasn’t taking myself too seriously. I encouraged the other speakers to do the same:

But the subject-matter - the whys and wherefores and state of play of advertising research 32 years ago - we did take seriously. People (or their companies) were shelling out good money for this. 

I started the course with a barrage of headlines of the “Is research killing advertising?” genre. And kicked the whole thing off with the comment “We could be forgiven for thinking this is the serial killers’ convention.”

This debate, of course, is still raging (or whatever one does on LinkedIn) today, as I now suspect it was raging thirty years previous to my course, back in the 1960s. And one thing that I was careful to do in the course was to look at the various advertising research methodologies, qual and quant. When should each be used? What’s the overall objective of each? The over-riding theme of the course was that it’s not simply “advertising research” but “people’s response to advertising/ideas” research. And that creative development research, for example, is used for deeper understanding of how people respond, and why - and how it can be improved. Not evaluation.

Fast forward 32 years and the plot has been well-and-truly lost. There may well still be MRS courses, but all I see flapping around the internet are flocks of White Papers. Many of these are shrill opinion pieces, given a veneer of scientific credibility through the addition of spurious charts, graphs and data tables.

Some of them are from individuals and organisations who I’d respected up to now.

This is an extract from The Cure for Dull 

 

“Only quant can truly measure dull”. 

Well, yes, only quant can truly measure anything. The clue is in the name. 

The paper goes on to state “Quantitative emotional measurement tends to produce stronger feeling, while over-reliance on focus groups can push work toward consensus and safety.”

Where to start? Apples and pears? Chickens and eggs?

But it’s not my business to get uppity and tell today’s agency leaders what’s what. I hope instead that at least some of those course delegates still remember what they learned from us in those far-off days - and are putting it into practice or passing it on to their juniors.