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Does insight stifle creativity? It doesn’t have to.
Yesterday I mentioned that Sir Martin Sorrel had cited recent research from the IAB, which looked at why clients value agencies and found that 87% of the sample pointed to the agencies’ “strategic consumer insight”. “Clients won’t move in the future unless they get quantitative justification for what they do,” said Sorrell. “We may not like it - creative departments of ad agencies certainly don’t - but that’s the way the world’s going.”
Nic Niewart responded to the Media Week article and Sir Martin’s comment with this: ‘If a creative worth anything finds this bad news, then you’re in the wrong business, baby. It is precisely the marrying of strategic insights- (the nodding of client heads in the early part of the pitch/presentation) COUPLED to a Brilliant Creative Interpretation of that sentence/finding/word that has been what great advertising is about. The client is happy, the agency is happy, AND you get combined great business results. Why has it taken so long for the bleeding obvious to be stated?’
This creative tension always intrigues me but having read a number of ‘death by powerpoint’ presentations of customer insight studies which pour forth data by the dozen but not much that is easily executionable, I can understand why creatives groan at the thought of yet more ‘insight’. It is interesting that an industry that is so focused on provising insight about customers should be so inept at providing its insight to its own customers in a form and language that is easy to read and interpret and is immediately actionable and executionable. How any brand manager can develop creative brief from 240 slides of data is beyond me, yet that is what they have to contend with.
I am going to unashamedly plug our work here - but only because it is directly relevant to giving creative teams insight that they can work easily with and which enhances their creative freedom rather than stifles it. The techniques that we use (Values Elicitation and Language and Behaviour Profiling) give brand managers and creative teams strategic customer insight, along with that illusive brand personality and distinct customer language bespoke to their brand which makes a clear brief easy, and enables the creative team to create their little hearts out.
To agree with Nic, it is the coupling of great customer wisdom and creative genius that leads to great advertising WITH business benefits.
Great insight, brilliant creative interpretation, fantastic business results - here’s one our insight made earlier (and we’re told had a sales uplift of 155%).