I dream of data dumps!

 

                                                                        Image: Ideogram

There must be an unwritten rule that, one day, you’ll look back fondly on things that annoyed you when they were ubiquitous. BoneyM, Wimpy, Pixie Boots, Poodle Perms, Malibu, Wham! 

And so it is with the world of work. I used to dread those Zip-folders containing 20 or more 100-page pdfs at the start of a strategy project. The ones that landed with a virtual thud in your in-box and a chirpy message from a junior: “you might find these interesting as background to our project.” Sub-text: I haven’t read them, neither has my boss, but we’re expecting you to read, understand, digest and come back to us asap with a brilliant inisghtful Analysis and Way Forward.

I never thought I’d say “those were the days” when it came to the delightfully-named Data Dump. But, today, the Dump is as dead as a Dodo. Because you receive the whole lot (and more) pre-chewed, semi-digested and regurgitated as Workslop. As the HBR article says, Workslop transfers the effort from creator to receiver. I can vouch for this. In the last year, it’s happened a few times. And I’ve had the rather frustrating task of swilling through the Workslop, trying to make sense of it, going back in many cases to original sources (if available), checking and reading afresh to bring my experience and perspective to the case.

It’s a waste of my time, quite frankly, and worse still, it makes me feel resentful. That my modus switches from exploratory, making connections and leaps of insight/creativity to critical and nit-picking apart, like the Head Teacher marking work. 

This website would be funny if it wasn’t so painfully close to the bone. 

The mantra today (which I’m sick of hearing as so many don’t seem to practice what they preach) is “human-first, humans empowered/turbo-charged by AI”. Substack and LinkedIn are riddled with various proclaimations in various degrees of pomposity. “The Great UnPlug!” “Being human is an act of rebellion!” General whingeing about loss of “voice.”

Well, no shit, Sherlock. As they say. Are you surprised? From politicians upwards, people are lazy and don’t want to take responsibility. Tick things off rather than do them well. Get it done not get it right. (As in “Get Brexit Done.”)

As for me, I’m not joining in. What started with models and templates and frameworks to find out what’s at the heart of a brand now continues with AI. I use it here and there, of course. But, by and large, I stick with my internot methods. The best test of any brand work I do is this: 

    - is the brand identity (in whatever format) original and unique to that brand?

    - is they way I’m expressing it to my client something only I could have created? Like this, but with         my own stamp on it?

But, in the future, will I be dreaming of Workslop? I wouldn’t count it out.    

And the brands played on

 

ideo.com

It all started at the end of summer. It must have been this story that sowed the seed - the much-shared latter-day Cautionary Tale of Nike. Massimo Giunco posted Nike: An Epic Saga of Value Destruction - I echoed the thoughts of many, muddled in with my own ...

 

Sacrifice human relationships, specialist knowledge, experience, informed judgement and insight - from employees to suppliers to customers to shoppers - on the altar of "data-driven”. This is a sad tale, brilliantly written (“a cannibal ecosytem”, “... less effective but easier to be measured vs. something that was more effective but less easy to be measured ...”). But not without hope that one of the greatest brands of our time can survive this self-inflicted malady

Hot on Nike’s heels, this came along - an article by Anders Indset on the theme of Marketing is dead - long live Marketing! The author starts by reflecting back to the glory days of German ad agencies in the early 2000s (a nice little nostalgia trip for me). And then, how brands faded into the background as years of CpCs, click-marketing, Customer Journeys and search optimisation took over. But, he concludes: The world of platforms and click-optimisation has reached its logical endpoint. When everyone’s on the stage, no-one watches any more.

 

So, what now, in the age of ChatGPT and LLMs? Anders hails a return to the good old marketing of Kotler and Aaker - investing in brands, the 4Ps, good ideas. I’m definitely all for this, and will even forgive Anders his rather bizarre inclusion of the “American” Kevin Roberts and his Lovemarks amongst the marketing and advertising greats.

 

The next thoughts that flitted into my consciousness were those of Paul Worthington of invencion, on Quantitative Destruction and The Efficiency Delusion. In these articles, he writes of “quantitative myopia” - a dangerous and arrogant myopia that ignores complex reality while focusing intently on a simplistic, quantitatively measureable model, which they believe represents everything that matters.

 

The “they” in all this, the quantitative myopics, are the executives rising to the top of companies. Nike is one example. Starbucks is another losing value in its aim to become a closed-system, “category of one”, where it doesn’t matter if customers have a rotten experience as they have no choice.

 

Meanwhile, all this is exacerbated by marketing budget cuts and “having to do more with less.” Anything to do with the customer - marketing, experience, branding - is now on a very thin shoestring.

 

All of this is opinion, of course. So I’ll bring in some data. I'm not against data. But it doesn’t drive me. Or even inform me - only humans do that. The 2024 McKinsey report on the state of Marketing in Germany is called Back to the Future. What are the big topics close to the hearts of Germany’s marketers in 2024? AI? Marketing ROI? Yes, these are important, but they don’t make the top three most important. And these represent a return to the core competencies of marketing:

1. Creative content - a renaissance of originality

2. Brand-building

3. Authenticity - in word and deed.

 

The evidence reels in thick and fast - the brands are back in town. System1 have recently demonstrated how creative consistency (which doesn’t mean matching luggage, by the way) leads to creative quality, stronger brands and greater profits.

 

Which brings me right up-to-date with Interbrand and The Best Global Brands 2024, celebrating its 25th anniversary. There’s plenty to celebrate, but also a warning or two: performance marketing tactics can drive short-term financial gains, but an increasingly short-term mindset has cost the world’s most valuable brands significantly.

 

Interbrand’s advice is good - look behind the clever-cleverness of this phrase: the fastest-growing companies are not branding their businesses - they’re businessing their brand.

 

So, there we are. Branding being back in business is in the air. I expect the quantitative myopics would explain all this through a mixture of the algorithm, the Extrawurst echo chamber and she-would-say-that-wouldn’t-she. 

 

But I prefer to put it down to synchronicity.

Synthetic, fake or just sh*t?

Fur, leather, meat - when you don’t want to wear or eat the real thing, there are alternatives. These are often described as “synthetic”, meaning that they’ve been been artificially produced in order to closely imitate the natural product. 

As well as the “artificial/not natural” connotations, “synthetic” also has associations of insincerity or affectedness. Fake. But fake can be a positive too, especially if presented as a clever alternative to using up natural resources, be they animal, vegetable or mineral.

I’m a bit slow off the mark, I admit. I only consciously heard the phrase “synthetic data” a couple of months ago in a seminar about “The Future of Measurement.” It was used in this context for data generated by AI to patch holes. This made me a little uneasy, but I brushed it off - after all, we’ve been patching holes in data via statisitcal modelling and analysis for as long as I’ve been in this business, and no doubt before that.

But the mention sparked a memory from another seminar, or something I read in the marketing press. That market research organisations such as Kantar are busy with R&D on “synthetic samples” which can generate “human-style responses.”

Does the euphemistic “synthetic sample” really mean fake people?

A year ago, Kantar were still moderately cautious about “synthetic samples”.  While AI has some great applications in market research (coding open-ended responses is an obvious example), the article points out some of the shortcomings of using AI as a substitute for human respondents. For example, look at the differences here:

I’m not surprised that the AI is more enthusiastic than real people about statements that sound AI-generated. Who in their right mind would agree to gobbledegook such as “my product is a way for me to bond/connect with others who share my passion”? Particularly if it’s bog cleaner or something.

The article concludes that: 

Our conclusion is that right now, synthetic sample currently has biases, lacks variation and nuance in both qual and quant analysis. On its own, as it stands, it’s just not good enough to use as a supplement for human sample.

And Kantar advise a blended approach based on “real people” and supplemented with AI.

Fast-forward a year and Kantar are far more gung-ho about it all. They’ve launched an AI Lab and appointed a Chief AI Scientist . And there’s a new GenAI marketing assistant, too. 

Competitive pressure, the race to be first, client demands for faster, faster - or genuine innovation and leadership? Who knows - but Kantar are not alone. Mark Ritson has written enthusiastically about his chums at an outfit called Evidenza.AI

Evidenza say “we survey AI copies of your customers to build finance-friendly sales and marketing plans ... we generate hundreds of synthetic customers based on your product category ... we test your messaging with synthetic customers.”

Meaning, I guess, use AI to generate marketing communication and throw it to the customer copies to get a tick on that box. No messy humans involved.

Self-fulfilling prophecy? Can we look forward to “synthetic sales”, too?

Cory Doctorow takes it a few leaps further in his brilliantly-titled critical piece, “The Coprophagic AI crisis.” From warnings about botshit ("inaccurate or fabricated content shat out at scale”) and human-created content sinking in the cesspit ("As the web becomes an anaerobic lagoon for botshit, the quantum of human-generated “content” in any internet core sample is dwindling to homeopathic levels.”) he goes on to consider the consequences should AI Search really take off:

The question is, why the fuck would anyone write the web if the only “person” who can find what they write is an AI’s crawler, which ingests the writing for its own training, but has no interest in steering readers to see what you’ve written? If AI search ever becomes a thing, the open web will become an AI CAFO and search crawlers will increasingly end up imbibing the contents of its manure lagoon.

Food for thought, and I feel distinctly queasy.

It’s another example of a contained system or black box that’s easy to control. Like home-grown problem: solution advertising.

And the answer is to get out of the system, go back to first principles, get inspiration from the internot. And remember that we are responsible for the data we produce and how it’s used. This stuff does matter.

We weren’t so bad

 

As yet another year draws to a close, I have to admit that I’ve been having some angsty, existential pangs in a “and what have you done?” sort of mode. Not in a full-on George Bailey-James Stewart manner, but irritating twinges, nonetheless.

What am I still doing in this business, at my age?

Couldn’t I have put my education and talents to better use?

Why am I just a touch ashamed to admit, these days, that my working life has been spent in advertising?

Thirty years ago, in London, every taxi driver knew the name Saatchi & Saatchi. Respondents in group discussions regularly joked about enjoying the ads more than the programmes. Our agency hired Alexandra Palace for the Christmas party - and I nonchalently flew off to LA the next day on three hours’ sleep for client product experience with British Airways.

It’s fashionable to regard advertising as a rather sorry, grubby little business these days. The glamour has passed its sell-by date and attempts are made to elevate it from the snake-oil salesman via association with super-scientific data-driven rigour or a holier-than-thou world-saving loftiness. The rot set in already in the 1990s when Kevin Roberts proclaimed Saatchis to be an “Ideas Company” rather than an advertising agency. 

But now and again, I read an article which warms the cockles of my old ad woman’s heart. And I’ll end my blog posts for this year with this marvellous article by Tom Roach . Although the main theme is the much-hyped imminent death of advertising, the underlying message is that maybe those working in the business could be a touch prouder of what they do. 

How the advertising industry uses the power of human imagination for commercial impact should be something we’re all in awe of.

As a measure of that commercial impact, Tom quotes a Deloitte study which estimates that every $1 spent on ads generates $6 in broader economic impact. Not bad for a grubby little industry - one of the few true proven levers of growth.

The role we play in driving the economy, and therefore society, forward is something we should be proud of. We often highlight advertising’s societal impact when talking about social purpose, but advertising’s economic impact alone should be a sufficient source of pride.

Well, maybe if you put it like that ... I may hang on in here for a while yet!

Getting your facts straight

 

I'm not sure when the obsession with "fact-based" and "data-driven" insights began, but I do know that often enough, chasing after spurious "facts" and/or data to support whatever argument you want to make takes more time than carefully constructing your knock-their-socks-off strategy. 

Let me take a good insight - Guns don't kill people, people do

Now, who in their right mind would demand to see the data or facts supporting that? The whole thing about insight is that when it's good, it's like an a-ha, a Eureka, a leap of faith, a revelation, the obvious that you'd never really thought about that way. Your mind has done a flip from rational, step-by-step logical thinking into a more holistic way of seeing the world.

I must admit it can be tiresome to be continually asked to back everything up with facts, or data. I'm a one woman show, and if clients think it's best use of my time scouring the internet for random information that may appear relevant to the case, but on closer inspection isn't, then so be it.

For my own part, I'd offer the following advice:

What are your reasons for demanding facts and data, and are they good, or is it about ticking the "selling it in to management" boxes?

Have a look at some of the facts and data you're presented with. Do you see a % sign, an asterisk and a source and think good-o, time to move on?

Only too often, I see "facts" presented along the lines of "32% of people believe that ...."

When looking at numbers and percentages, I always ask myself whether those numbers and percentages represent people directly, or not. If not, they may well represent something like € or £ , which likely means that they are less open to interpretation.

But if the percentage represents people, you really do need to find out at least which people, when and where, to judge whether the data is relevant to your case. And best to delve into what (was meant when the word "brand" was used in the survey, for example) and why the survey was done, while you're there.

For example, you may find that those numbers regarding propensity to switch brands during the pandemic were only referring to brands of toilet paper, not brands in general.

Or that the survey of young people's attitudes to social media privacy was carried out in 2015.

Or that the sample asked about brand activism consisted only of college students from the USA, who'd volunteered to take part in a survey on the topic.

It's far more dangerous to argue from the particular to the general than it is to admit to not having 100% relevant hard data to support a particular point.

That, by the way, is my view. Not a fact. 

Data, information, knowledge and wisdom

Photo by Martin Schitto, July 2020

Would I rather be knowledgable or wise? Can you be one without being the other?

I see a kind of progression, according to synthesis level, from data to information to knowledge to wisdom.

In a preamble to one of their articles The School of Life picked up the distinction between knowledge and wisdom, suggesting that knowledge is the accumulation of facts, figures and theories, while wisdom is the further synthesis of this knowledge with experience.

Knowledge can be forgotten, while wisdom can't.

Knowledge is specific to subject and context, while wisdom is universal and timeless. 

Regarding the latter point, many moons ago, I did my A-levels following my Cambridge Entrance Exams (this was a bit topsy-turvy, but that's always been my way). I had to swot much more for the A-Levels than the Cambridge Entrance Exam as these were more about regurgitating my knowledge - the structure of DNA and how it all worked, for example. For the Cambridge Entrance Exam in Biology, you'd get asked something like "What is the importance of water to life."

I've written a post or two about A.I, and I fancy that a machine these days may have fared better in my Biology A-Level than I did. I don't discount the idea that a machine could be described as "knowledgeable" - why not, if we already describe machines as "intelligent"?

But I doubt that we'll ever have a machine that is wise in the way that a human being is.

I'd welcome a change from thinking about "data-driven insights" to "the wisdom of insight".

The rather pensive photo of me in my cellar pub had me philosophising, about the Road to Excess and all that stuff.

I know I'm doing something wrong as I don't seem to have cracked the "wealthy" bit of the healthy, wealthy and wise thing, although I'm not sure wisdom brings wealth these days.

Maybe it's a case of "Late to bed and late to rise makes a (wo)man happy, healthy-ish and wise"?

AI: Master, Servant or Something Else Altogether?

The use of AI in the entertainment industry has been the subject of a number of posts here - there's Creative Direction by Numbers  and Why advertising may be the last refuge for creativity - and if you put my entire blog through your super-advanced AI platform, you'll doubtless find many more.

I was talking with a friend about the publishing industry recently - and how new novels seem to be identikit these days - from the reviews ("heartbreakingly sad yet life-affirming") through to the interchangeable cover designs. Many new novels seem throwaway and forgettable - with a superficiality and lack of edge that suggests they are the literary equivalent of the selfie.

Films seem to have gone this way a long time ago, and this week, I read an interview with the CEO of corto.ai where, yet again, I got the impression that entertainment is increasingly data-driven, and not necessarily in a good way. The company "have successfully developed a quantitative model of how various narrative structures drive performance for movies, trailers and marketing campaigns." And here, I'm assuming "performance" means pure commercial performance, not awards or reputation won, or whether the film will go into the annals of history as a classic.

Here again, if you look at the entertainment example given on the website, the analysis is all about "what were" and "what have been" - that is, the old rearview mirror method of predicting the future based on the past. A self-perpetuating system.

No creative person needs evidence derived from AI to understand that what people find interesting is a balance between "known" and "novelty" - nor can AI really help you to get this balance right for any particular individual. It's part intuition, part good judgement plus a large sprinkling of luck.

In contrast, another AI agency, discover.ai, presents a different philosophy. Less concerned with Hollywood (although I am sure Hollywood could benefit from this approach) and more with brands, this agency makes it clear that expertise in AI and expertise in people work hand-in-hand. The blog post Why we should embrace bias gives another perspective to the one that suggests bias is a negative in research that AI can help eliminate. It's well worth reading, with some points dear to my heart - "No objective truth", "Data is not reality" and "People make decisions, not data". I particularly like the quote from Gary Smith )"The AI Delusion"):

While computers are very good at discovering patterns in data, they are useless in judging how best to apply them in the real world because they lack human wisdom and common sense.

AI is best used to accelerate and augment human intelligence, not substitute for it.

I'm jolly excited by AI - in the way that I'm far more excited by a springboard than a straitjacket.

You can do magic

One of the strangest phrases to have crept into the marketing vocabulary in recent years is "data-driven insights." Now, I'm not keen on "insight" with the added "s", but it's the contradiction between "data-driven" and "insight" that I find tricky.

Firstly, there's the implication that no human mind is involved, that the data is crunched or analysed in a machine and the insights (sic) are churned out at the other end.

Then there's the suggestion that the insights are somehow superior in quality, and possibly more robust, as they come from data, rather than being plucked out the airy-fairy ether.

And wrapped up in all this is assumption that these superior insights, untouched by the human mind, represent absolute truths.

The few "data-driven insights" I've seen have been blindingly obvious statements which have nevertheless been backed up by an analysis of gadzillions of data points. But having that back-up somehow imbues the finding with a tremendous weight and importance that it wouldn't have had if some planner person had simply stated it.

AI is only so good at recognising patterns in data. To me, the skill of the planner is to combine rational thinking with other modes of perception - be it intuition, experience of the senses or the emotions. It's all of these combined that add up to true insight. And just because we can't measure something, or gather squillions of data points on it doesn't mean it's not important.

As the author Phillip Pulmann eloquently expresses in this article, a touch of magic belongs in our world.

Measurement Madness

Some of the wisest words I have read in my career come from the social scientist Daniel Yankelovich, on the subject of measurement:

The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. 

The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. 

The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. 

The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.
'Corporate Priorities: A continuing study of the new demands on business'

These words were written in 1972, in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, and illustrated what is known as the McNamara fallacy or quantitative fallacy (Robert McNamara was US Secretary for Defence). This fallacy is making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (metrics) and ignoring all others. For example, basing the 'success' of a war purely on enemy body count.

I have often used these words to argue my point with clients and quantitative research agencies that marketing, like war or sport, is not an exact science. There is perhaps a fifth step to the argument:

The fifth step is to attach undue meaning and importance to that which is easily measurable.

These days, with digitalisation, we can measure so much more. And although company and even personal performance can't be put on a par with war and loss of life, we should guard against making the same mistake.

A few years ago, only business people talked about KPIs. Nowadays, people have personal KPIs - calories consumed, steps taken, words written, likes achieved - and all the rest, all enabled by digital technology.

I will continue to cite Yankelovich. And not just to the business clients that I work with, but to friends and acquaintances who are in danger, perhaps, of not seeing the truth for the data.

His ideas will live on

I am very saddened to hear of the death yesterday, at 68, from pancreatic cancer, of Hans Rosling. For those who are not familiar with this Swedish 'edutainer', I blogged about him here.

Hans Rosling had a talent for explaining the world, life and the human universe on the basis of facts. It sounds dry, but it never was. As an example, here's a short article about 5 ways the world is doing better than you think. 

In these days of negative thought and 'alternative facts', he will be sadly missed.

Artificial vs. Intelligence

The APG UK's forthcoming conference to be held on 25th May, is entitled 'Strategy vs. Robots'. The publicity features the clever idea of a Top Trumps -style card, comparing a robot with a human strategic planner. The robot (slightly) out-trumps Ms Mills on intelligence and processing power while our human hero wins hands down on creativity and sense of humour.

It promises to be a good event, with such people as Kate Fox (of 'Watching the English' fame) and Steve Hilton (whose has published a book entitled 'More Human'). I'm not sure who is going to be representing or sticking up for the robots, but maybe they will invite a special guest from Japan.

Apparently, McCann Japan have appointed an AI robot as a creative director. This new employee will be 'mining and analysing creative databases of adverts to find the best commercials for products and messages.' I am still not entirely sure this isn't a wind-up, as the 'new employees meeting' where AI-CD ß was due to appear was April 1st, which seems a bit fishy to me. However, stranger things have happened.

I've blogged a couple of times about where I stand on the planning - or even creativity - by AI and algorithm debate, here and here .

I'm old enough now not to worry about my own job being taken over by a robot. But I guess in the end, there always has to be someone human working to design and build the robots.

Or does there?

Plannersaurus

I've often wondered about reframing my - ahem - age in this young people's business as being 'vintage' or even 'retro', both of which seem all the rage these days. Vintage Planning does have quite a ring to it.

But I've decided that I'm quite happy to be a Planning Dinosaur if that's what people want to call me. A few years ago - not quite the Jurassic Age - I blogged about this very topic - The dinosaur fights back, quoting John Hegarty's comments on Big Data.

I've found another excellent blog post on the matter, this time from Richard Huntington, In Praise of Dinosaur Planning where another creative dinosaur, Dave Trott, is quoted: 'Put a dinosaur in a field of sheep, the dinosaur f***ing wins.' Being a dinosaur is no more than believing in the fundamentals of account planning, not getting carried away by the latest fad, or metric, or technological possibility.

It's about effectiveness - doing the right thing for the brand.

And it's about inspiring and nurturing great creative work that connects with people.

Maybe what we should strive to be is an adaptable dinosaur.

The next big thing isn't going to leap out of an algorithm

The publishing industry is one that's dear to my heart and my alter ego as a children's author. Interestingly, publishing is one of the world's oldest industries, which proves a certain amount of resilience to the slings and arrows, but it's also one of the most panicky and paranoid sectors and one of the slowest to catch up with modern technology and marketing.

I recently read an article in the Journal of the Society of Authors by Michael Bhaskar of the digital publisher Canelo and author of The Content Machine. The article is entitled "Big Data is watching you", which of course feeds directly into the publisher panic and paranoia.

Bhaskar relates how publishers have looked at amazon's winning ways with data, such as the data-driven recommendations and have established 'consumer insight' teams:

"These executives, sometimes drafted in from Wall Street or big retailers, crunch numbers on a grand scale. They aim to better understand their audiences and sales patterns, and to ensure that publishing  is tightly targeted at specific demographics... their clout is growing by the day...More than ever sales and marketing departments will require editors to back up their acquisitions with hard data."

Maybe it's no wonder that the publishers are paranoid.

But there is a flaw in all this, and it's something that industries with more sophisticated marketing departments can tell you. It's true that we can potentially learn far more from data these days. But this data only informs on the past and perhaps the present, if it's real-time.

Data can't tell you anything, as I have written here before. And people can rarely tell you what they want or desire in the future. Bhaskar acknowledges this in his article: "looking at past bestsellers is no guide to what will come next; nothing about 'The Hunger Games' suggested it would give way to erotica in the bestseller lists."

The point is that publishers have something that amazon don't have. Amazon is a retailer, simple as that. What publishers have is a nose for literature, intuition and empathy for human beings, for what makes them tick. And they have a duty to innovate, to seek out the new, to be bold, to take chances and to have an impact on culture and society long-term.

Which is all a more satisfying calling than crunching spreadsheets.

   

The age of Big Insight

The age of Big Data has been upon us for some time, with marketers and advertising rightly excited about the possibilities that the amalgamation of data - particularly "found data" in terms of the digital detritus almost all human beings leave behind in their daily lives - gives us.

If you've been in this game for some time, as I have, you may remember the thrill that accompanied econometric models in their early days. These were going to tell us the secret of how advertising worked and what made people buy our brands. The econometric models are very useful, of course, to help marketers interpret the past, but alone they cannot predict the future. And a badly conceived or interpreted model is worse that none at all.

Every time such a model is presented, I find it useful for the agency to re-iterate what correlation actually is, and what it isn't. At college, I had "correlation does not imply causation" drummed into me I don't know how many times. It's like this, if A and B are correlated:

A could cause B
B could cause A
A and B are the consequences of a common cause but one does not cause the other. So, sleeping in your shoes does not cause headaches, even though instances of the two events are correlated. One look at our friend above can tell you the underlying cause.
There is no connection between A and B - the correlation is coincidental.

This is just one of the factors that Tim Harford considers in an excellent FT Magazine article about Big Data and the potential pitfalls in its interpretation. We must beware that the errors we make with more manageable data sets are not simply compounded as the data set gets bigger - for example, via sample bias. And, in the end, the human factor in terms of insightful interpretation remains key. His closing sentences sum this up very nicely:

“Big data” has arrived, but big insights have not. The challenge now is to solve new problems and gain new answers – without making the same old statistical mistakes on a grander scale than ever.

An equal and opposite reaction

This is the time of year when you get all those ingeniously named trends for the next year, such as this latest little lot from Trendwatching. I'm always amused by picking out the counter-trend to each one that's mentioned, sometimes in the same article.

My eye was caught by the Mychiatry trend - not content with people quantifying their bodies and bodily functions, people are now going to use technology to measure their minds. This trend is manifested via ideas such as an app to record, share and analyse dreams (as if other people's dreams weren't dull enough, you can now access a whole internet full of strangers' dreams) or headphones that detect the user's mood and play music accordingly from a database (I do hope that a human being of some description has been involved in the compilation and classification of the database.)

This trend, according to Trendwatching, is being fuelled by "those for whom mental health is (like physical fitness, career progress, and academic achievements) a new benchmark, yet another area for them to outperform their peers." Well, yukkety yuk. Can't wait for all these outperforming benchmark junkies to start wiring their kids up to these devices, too.

Swallowing back the admission that I did post a score I got on some pointless Facebook quiz the other day, I'll move quickly on to the next trend: No Data. This is much nicer. This is all about "brands that offer brilliant service while loudly and proudly eschewing the collection of personal data." There is certainly a need for this, with 82% of people on a global basis believing that companies collect too much information on consumers.

Unfortunately, Trendwatching can't offer up any examples on this yet.

Reaction, counter-reaction. Who's to say which way people will go in 2014? But one thing is certain - there will be no one certain answer. Planners and Marketers are best keeping their minds open, their antennae on alert, using all modes of perception.

Quoting Blake:
"May God us keep
From single vision & Newton's sleep."   

Market research made friendly

When I started my first job, market research was something of an arcane art - not terribly accessible to outsiders. Most quantitative surveys were still done on paper via an interviewer with a clipboard and ideas like CATI (Computer Assisted Telephone Interviews) were considered most avant garde.

It wasn't just the interviewing, either. Presentations were endless tables of numbers and bar charts, with a few pies here and there if you were lucky. Some poor so-and-so would have drawn many of these by hand.

The first time I saw a "smiley scale" it was either for children, or for a multi-country study in an attempt to achieve consistency in the questioning where language failed. No-one at that point imagined that adults might actually enjoy taking part in research survey if they were more like a game.

These days, quantitative market research is as fun and funky as any part of the communications process, with great blogs like ilovecharts showing the very best of infotainment today. Take your pick there at the moment between 'Most visited websites per country' or 'Acceptable/Unacceptable facial hair.'

And then there's the beautifully cute IKEA online questionnaire about 'My Life at Home' in Germany. As part of the campaign 'Time for more Home', this interactive survey is fun and easy to do - as you'd expect of the original participative brand!

One word of warning though, if you don't come into the spring chicken category. You're OK up to age 54, but from 55 onwards your cartoon representation is definitely the grey-haired granny!

The data tsunami

One of the commonest complaints that I hear from marketers these days is that they simply have too much information and data. This over-abundance is sometimes described as a mountain or an overload, but more often than not, metaphors from the destructive world of water are used.

There's a data deluge, or data tsunami. People feel that they are swamped with information or drowning in data.

And lately, I have also heard the term "infobesity", with the analogy to fast food. Too high a quantity of too low a quality, making our brands distinctly unhealthy.

My approach to data has always been to take a deep breath first. Then to see what I've got and start to skim through it, with the following in mind:

1. Just because it exists and someone has paid for it, doesn't mean you have to use it
2. Hone your instinct for what is useful. If you read case histories, they generally don't use much information or data, but the stuff that's there is crucial. Ditto, most presentations, even if they are 100 page ppts, will only have two or three killer slides.
3. It's all about making choices and making hypotheses early - then using the data or information selectively to back these up. Remember, in this job, there's seldom one right answer, but the right answer is the one you decide on and stick with.
4. I like to organise data and information around a few key themes - these will start to occur to you as you skim through what you have.

And, finally, don't feel bad about ignoring information that doesn't feel right, or is simply inaccessible. The next time someone circulates a 200 page pdf with the comment "useful/interesting report," ask them which bits, exactly. The chances are that they won't have read it, either.

Whatever happened to lighthouse brands?

I think it was Adam Morgan that coined the phrase "Lighthouse Brands" some time back in the last century, as part of the Challenger Brand theory.

OK, times have changed and brands have to adapt, but I have always liked the concept of a brand as a lighthouse. And, after all, lighthouses still perform a vital function today, even if technology has changed.

In much of my reading on the subject of brands, I see a focus on 'how to fit your brand into the consumer's (sic) life today' rather than 'how to inspire people with your brand for how they might like to live tomorrow.'

There's a lot of talk about relevance, especially to the here and now, about fitting seamlessly into people's lives, about harmony instead of disruption or interruption and of course about meeting the consumer's (sic) needs.

There is rather less about allure, desire, magic, dreams.

I can't help but feeling that many of these seamless brands are rather like stalkers. They lurk and they collect data and they make notes and then creep up on you and ambush you based on your past behaviour, not on your future dreams. Because, like stalkers, you mean far more to them than they mean to you.

Should good brands really have to resort to this?

I can't recall ever having been stalked by a lighthouse.

The dinosaur strikes back

It's been a while since I actually wanted to stand up and cheer someone in the advertising business, but this article in AdAge elicited a small 'Hurrah!'

The report is from a 'Wired Global Conversation' panel in which John Hegarty took part. When the flavour-of-last-year subject of Big Data came up, Hegarty commented, in reference to the recent horse meat scandal: 'You look at too much data and you don't actually see what's going on around you.'

Bob Greenberg, of R/GA retaliated with an example of how data could be used creatively - '...when I walk into Nike Town and they know who I am and they'll be able to serve up really relevant content.'

Presumably unimpressed with the prospect of the serving-up of content (somehow that word always reminds me of stomach contents - perhaps Mr Hegarty had the same feeling) that's not just quite relevant but really relevant, the veteran ad man retorted with a classic line:

'To those brands that say "I understand you" I say F*** off, you don't understand me. Mind your own business, I don't want to be understood by you. I don't understand myself sometimes...and it can be fun.'

Hear, hear. Even if they aren't stupid enough to 'say' this directly in their communication, there are plenty of brands - or at least people who manage them - who write this down in their strategy, their positioning. We understand 'the consumer'. There are even departments in some companies called Consumer Understanding departments.

It is difficult enough to understand yourself, or your nearest and dearest. The people who run brands should realise: you don't need to understand every aspect of my psyche in order to make a washing powder that gets my clothes clean without wasting energy.

John Hegarty may be an advertising dinosaur, but think about dinosaurs for a moment. One thing is sure - everyone remembers their names.

Data can't tell you anything

I don't know if it's just me, but I never look at amazon's recommendations for me. I do, however, follow up avidly with "people who bought this also bought that..."

Why? There are a few reasons. First of all, amazon have been so off in their recommendations sometimes - basing these on something I bought as a present that really wasn't my cup of tea at all. Or a set book I bought for my son's school. And secondly, the "people who bought this also bought that" is a simple statement of fact, not an attempt at a prediction or a judgement. Finally, in my egotistical way, I assume that, while "people" probably have predictable and consistent tastes, mine are so widely eclectic and downright weird that even someone who knows me well couldn't really predict what I might like (how many times have I had to give up on some trashy novel that a friend pressed into my hand on the promise that "you'll love this"?) - let alone a computer.

There has been increasing criticism of Google and Facebook forcing us into what Eli Pariser describes as The Filter Bubble which goes beyond meaningless recommendations into the sphere of these digital behemoths limiting and controlling the internet for us, based on past behaviour. You can do worse than taking a few of the steps recommended by Eli Pariser to escape the bubble.

And, for those of us in marketing: let's not get seduced by Big Data. And there I go, falling into my own trap. Data can't seduce me any more than research can tell me what to do. Algorithms don't think, they compute. The research does not say and the market does not demand.

All these things are inanimate. They cannot judge quality of interaction, or know the complete context - or separate a meaningless correlation from a meaningful one. Nor can they predict.

Only human beings can do these things - the data can't tell us anything on its own.