A Thousand Points of Dim Light
I think it’s fair to say that we love to talk about insight in agency land.
We like to argue about the best way to identify them and unearth them… Just how exactly should one arrive at an insight?
We like to talk about the different flavours of Insight: real insight, human insight, behavioural insights, data-driven insights, channel insights, brand insights, category insight etc etc etc etc.
We also like to argue about the best way to define them. What exactly constitutes an insight? Is it an unspoken truth? Is it a transformative observation that unlocks growth? Even worse, is it a revelation?
Our clients often demand insight as part of our response to their briefs. And It’s seen as one of the key sources of value that an agency brings to the party: an understanding of the audience and the wider world. Understanding which might not exist within a marketing organisation yet.
It’d be foolish to argue against the importance of consumer and market understanding in a business like ours which is focussed on influence. Understanding the target audience and their motivations where a purchase decision is concerned is undeniably important.
What is the role of an insight? Irrespective of the exact definition you favour, my feeling is that an insight - is essentially an idea: something that helps you look at the problem you’re facing in a new and interesting way. The way that this ideas manifest itself can vary: an observation about an audience captured as a piece of original writing , a piece of art, a passage from a novel or book, an interview…any kind of artefact could fulfil this function. And maybe ‘enlightening’ is a better word than some of the more grandiose terms which get used frequently in this field, such as ‘relevatory’.
That sounds simple enough, but it might leave many rolling their eyes. It would appear that like many live debates in our industry, we could rightly be accused of losing perspective. It’s a word that’s in danger of losing it’s meaning, of losing it’s potency. For the last 12 months or so, I’ve had to think alot about Insight having started a new role focussed on this topic. As someone who is a strategist by trade, I’ve been struck by several things during this time:
Insight as a noun, Insight as a verb
We have insight departments, that specialise in the generation and sourcing of insights. Why not just call this research? And when did research become so unfashionable? Insight is now used as a verb: the act of finding and sourcing information to synthesis into insight. It is also a noun: the name of a thing which we use to convey information. An insight.
This might be overkill.
Could we not go back to having ‘research departments’? Or, perhaps we could take a leaf out of agency Nonfiction’s book - they employ a person to be their head of Investigative Strategy. Presumably, they oversee a group of investigative strategists. The word insight conjurs images of a person blessed with extra-sensory perception. A savant. In reality, in a world full of data - much of it less than useful - perhaps we need more investigators. More detectives. People with an informed hunch about the nature of the problem in front of a team and a nose for finding the most pertinent, interesting or provocative information which will help lead the work to a better or more interesting place.
Demand outstrips supply
Agency teams are under pressure to be insightful. As i said at the top of this piece, client’s often demand that their agency teams provide them with fresh “insights” at every stage of the planning process. It’s a core part of the ‘outside perspective’ that creates value in the agency client relationship. But, I think it’s fair to say that the demand outstrips supply. This inbalance is a function of the fact that most categories and indeed most consumer behaviour is/are actually slow moving. ‘New’ insights are hard to come across or articulate. This is in spite of the fact we now have access to more data than ever before - though often this data is often poor quality or unsuited to the task of reframing our understanding about a problem (more on this shortly)
The relentless demand for insight leads people toward bad practice. Toward confusing facts with insights. Yes, 50% of people dislike Marmite. But - it’s only when you frame that fact as something along the lines of “Marmite being the UK’s most polarising foodstuff” you get to interesting ideas. That’s a thought so strong it has sustained a brand for the best part of 20 years.
It also promotes people making statements which are what one of my friends once described as ‘seminally obvious’. Busy Mums want convenience for example (or any of the other hackneyed, well-trodden examples in the image above) Correct, perhaps - but not strong enough or spiky enough to drive a new and novel approach to a brief speaking to this audience. Too often we take the path of least resistance and churn out ‘seminal obviousness’. This is especially true when media or comms planners are in ‘exploration’ mode. The phase of nearly every media planning process whereby planners demonstrate how much reading they’ve done - and regurgitate the ‘key insights’ across brand, consumer, category and culture (or whatever other organising logic you’re employing). Again, the culprit here is our need to demonstrate understanding to the client: too often we want to show how much work we’ve done. How much we understand. Often this can feel like a replay of the brief, telling people what they already know.
The News Matrix. Source: Tortoise Media
I love Tortoise Media’s framework for the news each week: they use a 2x2 framework which sorts news stories based on whether something is ‘important’ on the vertical axis or surprising on the horizontal. We should be able to present important information, even when it is not surprising. Not all information needs to be promoted and elevated to the level of ‘insight’.
Too often we look in the wrong place
Get out of the office. Go and speak to people. Speak to the customer. Drink copious amounts of coffee and tea. Ask questions. Ask for metaphors. Ask them to describe brands as celebrities and give reasons why. Talk about what makes them optimistic about the future. Or scares them.
If you can’t do this in person, do it via zoom. Lean on your friends. Leans on friends of friends. Qual doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive.
The impact of this kind of exercise nearly always outweighs the effort required to do the work. Use their words to decorate your meeting rooms, your pitch decks or presentation.
Bring the consumer into the process. The world will do the work for you, if you let it.
We’re too obsessed with being right. We should be obsessed with being interesting
I used the Marmite example above in a document recently. As it’s for a ‘global’ audience who might not be familiar with Marmite, it was reasonably suggested that I try and find a more international example demonstrating the difference between a fact and an insight. I asked my team. I was given the below example:
Fact: Batman is a superhereo appearing in Comic books published by DC Comics. He was created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger and debuted in 1939 (source: Wikipedia)
Insight: Batman is a billionaire practicing karate on the mentally ill.
Batman a billionaire practicing karate on the mentally ill, call it what it is.
— Jefté (@DonCommaJaun) July 23, 2017
It wasn’t what I was expecting. And it might not be a ‘conventional’ approach - but once i’d given it some thought - you can see the potential that this type of thought might have for a creative brief regarding batman. Do you have to agree with it? No. Would this foundation enable you to look at the franchise in a new way? Yes. That has to be the price of admission for ‘insight’ - the thinking helps take you to new and interesting places, even if sometimes they’re not obvious or ‘safe’. Where could you get to if you’re willing to explore the corners you’d previously thought off limits?
Yes we have to represent the consumer in the communications planning process - but that shouldnt mean we default to safe, clinical or pedestrian language. Human experience is messy and doesn’t fit into neat boxes. Neither should our langauge. Words are important.
Insight generation is a creative act. An act of imagination
And this brings to me to my final point. We don’t see the act of writing or formulating insight as a creative act. It is often too logical, too factual. Too inarguable. And the consequence of this is that the way we articulate audience insight tends towards the average. Toward the generic.
We must see this as an opportunity to stretch our imaginations. To indulge our creative side. To look at the world in a new way. Using the data we have at our disposal as the means to an end, not the end in itself. This is my promise to myself over the next 12 months: to have fun. To see this side of our work as an act of imagination as much as anything.
A thousand points of dim light
To bastardise William Burroughs, so often when we approach insight work we end up with ‘1000 points of dim light’ - a vast array of data points instead of one, significant and potent thought. The demands placed upon us - and the oversupply of information which we find ourselves working with - all contribute. Insights into our audience are of course, vital. However, we need to do better with how we approach them. These ideas are sacred and should be elevated above the merely factual. By describing our research work as ‘insight’ we devalue the contribution that genuinely ‘enlightening’ thinking can provide. The more we can do to lean into the messiness of our audiences lives, through the words we use and the places we search for our thinking the better. Our work is a full contact sport - it doesnt happen at desks and it doesnt happen in powerpoint and it doesnt happen in TGI. It happens outside, on the high street. In homes. In shops. That’s where commerce meets culture and that’s where we should spend our time.
