The lives of others. To find a way in, we must find the way out of our own
I fucking hate insight. It’s an excuse for the po-faced beard-scratching recycling of the fucking obvious. The uncritical parading of clickbait platitudes. Or the summoning of the kind of half-baked psychological insight that wouldn’t be out of place in a late night dorm room bong hit marathon. We worship at insight’s altar and in the hallowed darkened backroom of the focus group, convinced that if we can summon its holy transfixing, revelatory spirit we’ll finally access the Kingdom of Relevance. Our fervour blinds us to the more ancient and still potent magic of execution and idea. And to the essential truth that one can be relevant as hell and still be boring as fuck. Insight. Give me a break.
And yet.
“A piece of information which is both obvious, but unknown”
“A fresh observation that unlocks creativity”
“Something that you didn’t know before"
“An astonishing disclosure about real people, the brands they use or the world they live in.”
“A fresh, potent and energizing truth.”
“Something that gives you a new way of looking at a situation. And it has to be something that your brand can have a role in addressing.”
“Like a refrigerator… the moment you look into it, a light comes on”.
"A new understanding, probably of human behaviour or attitude, as a result of which action may be taken and an enterprise more efficiently conducted."
“Seeing something which is only obvious after you have seen it!”
“A fresh and thought-provoking perception (about the consumer, the category, the brand and so on) that can be applied to improve a business solution, to challenge a marketing strategy, stimulate a different communication idea.”
“Communications of great economy achieved through the use of unexpected associations between contrasting or disparate words or ideas.”
Etc.
Round and round we go. Oh how we like to talk about what an insight it. And is not. Round and round and round.
When I compare my strategic thinking and output with these definitions and demands I can only conclude that I have consistently failed to deliver as a planner. Never mind that there seem to be rather more definitions of what an insight is than there are compelling real-world examples that delivered real economic value for a client organisation.
It’s hard to recall when the tipping point was reached and some of us may not recall a time before, but it was not always like this. I share Helen Edward’s mild bemusement at the shift that’s occurred when she writes:
“Research agencies used to be content with diligently providing 'findings'. Useful, occasionally revealing, always grounding reports of what consumers were thinking, or how they were actually using products and services. Marketing teams, combining data from different research episodes, would parlay these findings into 'learnings' - general principles to guide marketing and communications decisions. However, it seems that this is no longer enough. Virtually every research agency talks about insight generation. One or two have even stretched the noun into a verb to describe their core activity as ‘insighting’.”
Insighting. God help us. Perhaps if we simply called it ‘understanding' we’d might un-bunch our undewear. Certainly I think we’d spend less time policing what may and not may not be granted permission to be an insight. We night stop us treating it as some kind of sacred object or magical material that can be ‘mined’ (the deeper the better, of course), or unearthed from the recesses of people’s sub-conscious brains. And it might remind us that insight is neither a guarantee of marketing greatness or indeed the only path to it. “Sometimes”, as Helen Edwards reminds us “breakthrough revelation just won't be there, but empathy, product superiority, clever innovation and good communications can still ensure a competitive edge.” Along with that it might open up an appreciation that understanding comes in many forms. And that ‘consumer insight’ is not the only flavour available to us.
Many are quick to tell us that ‘insight’ must give us some visceral, thrilling sensation when we encounter them - that they must trigger some epiphanic ‘Aha moment’ in which like Archimedes we are transported and squeal with the joy of our Eureka moment. But as Paul Feldwick reminds us:
“If insight refers to a moment of illumination, it is a transitory experience. A new way of thinking about a problem is only new for a short term. Today's Aha! moment, if it is any use, is tomorrow's received wisdom. This should tell us that insight is not an important goal in itself, but a means to an end. All insight is provisional, anyway. One moment of it leads to another, and they should lead to visions, decisions and actions.”
And this for me is the crucial point. Feldwick’s words remind us that insight is not merely a strategic artefact or deliverable. It’s far more important than that. It’s a disposition, a philosophy and ideology about the centrality of the consumer in creating value, it’s a way of relating to those whom marketing serves - and as such it’s a process and way of working before it’s a snappy sentence.
But what is the use of this ‘insight’? Why on earth do we need it? In answering this question many will I imagine, reach for the words of Bill Bernbach when he opined: “At the heart of an effective creative philosophy is the belief that nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature, what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action, even though his language so often camouflages what really motivates him. If you know these things about a man you can touch him at the core of his being.”
On the centrality of insight/understanding to effectiveness I am in fully agreement with Mr. Bernbach. But I cannot help but feel that his words frame insight as something that renders communication a more powerful force that works upon the consumer. In so doing it rather obscures the fact that what matters is not what advertising does to people, but what people do with advertising, and that consumers (i.e. people) have agency - and that they have choices. As Merry Baskin has written: “Why do we need insight? Well, our communications efforts do not persuade shoppers to dash blindly into stores and start buying exactly what we tell them to.” It is (happily) the autonomy of people that necessitates insight.
So recognising the agency of consumers, I prefer the words of the pioneer of qualitative research Wendy Gordon, when she said that “Human beings 'allow' brands into their lives only if they are relevant”. This is the true value of insight to corporations. As Jeremy Bullmore wrote: “The call for insights is natural… marketing companies don't want research; they want enlightenment. Conventional market research, professionally conducted, can paint an invaluable picture of the immediate past; but companies also need help in forging their futures.”
Our starting point must always be the lives of other people, not our own realities, egos, experiences, and preoccupations. As Atticus Finch says to his daughter Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” Understanding the gaps and frustrations, the unfulfilled needs, the external and internal conflicts, the pain points, the trade-offs and paradoxes that people experience in their daily lives opens up the way to create value for people. It renders the organisation forward facing. So if as Peter Drucker famously said, the true purpose of marketing is “to create a customer”, then insight is the path to accomplishing that. In the (slightly over-claiming) words of Drucker again - “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”
But finding a way into peoples lives, also means finding a way out of our own. Because marketing and advertising professionals really do live in a bubble. Beginning with the data from the IPA’s 2019 agency census, we see that:
In creative and non-media agencies with fewer than 200 employees, women account for 36% of those in C-suite roles
In agencies with more than 200 employees, women account for 30% of those in suite roles
The average age of employees in the industry is 34 years, while 6% are aged 50 years and over.
35% of creative roles are occupied by women
Among agencies able to supply ethnic diversity data for their employees, 86% of employees were identified as being from a white background, and 14% from an ethnic minority
Having conducted in 2018 the largest ever self-completion census of the media and advertising industry in the UK, the work conducted by the UK’S Advertising Diversity Taskforce published as Who are We? also provides us with some telling findings:
While 7% of the total population is privately educated, 31% of those in leadership roles are privately educated
Whilst respondents from a BAME background are less likely to have been privately educated than white respondents, they are still more than twice as likely to have been privately educated as the UK average
79% of respondents came from a ABC1 social grade background - compared with 60% of the total population. Put another way, just 17% of respondents came from a C2DE background, compared with 40% of the UK population
Only 10% of the sample were aged 45 and over (45% are under 30) And only 2% were 55+ By comparison, 29% of the UK workforce is aged 50+ according to the Office of National Statistics (ONS)
Women outnumber men within the industry until Director level, at which point the gender ratio starts to reverse
Only 8% of people in leadership positions are BAME
It is not surprising then to discover that marketing is a mono-culture. Evidence here comes from analysis conducted by BBH using the attitude and lifestyle statements in UK’s TGI database. The statements items ranged from mundane (“I use a refillable water bottle most days”) to the metaphysical (“there’s little I can do to change my life”). From this a ‘group cohesion’ score was arrived at. When one looks at cohesion by profession, marketing emerges as by far the most like-minded industry that TGI measures:
As Harry Guild puts it:
“This is advertising’s biggest problem in a single chart. This is the monoculture. How can we possibly understand, represent and sell to an entire country when we exist in such a bubble? We like to style ourselves as free thinkers, mavericks and crazies, but the grim truth is that we’re a more insular profession than farming and boast more conformists than the military.”
Research conducted by Reach Solutions and published as ‘The Aspiration Window’ makes clear quite how much of a gulf exists between this monoculture and the lives and values of the modern mainstream. The study looked at the differences between the advertising and marketing industry, and the modern mainstream (defined as the middle 50% in terms of household income (£20k-£55k). And the findings are telling:
When asked to estimate the values of the mainstream, marketing and advertising professionals get it profoundly wrong. They underestimate self-direction, universalism and benevolence, and they overestimate the mainstream’s focus on hedonism, achievement and power.
Both the mainstream and advertising and marketing professionals rate extrinsic motivations - so things like money, image, status - as less important than intrinsic motivations - things such as love, relatedness, empowerment, growth. However, people in marketing and advertising put significantly more emphasis on these - an index of 130 versus 100 for the mainstream.
Moreover, advertising and marketing people wildly overestimate the importance of extrinsic aspirations to the mainstream. Where the mainstream give extrinsic aspirations a cumulative importance rating of 3.8 (out of 10), people in marketing and advertising predict that the mainstream would give aspirations relating to fame, money and image a rating of 7.4.
70% of the advertising and marketing sample grew up in a household where the chief income earner was social grade AB. This is compared to just 29% of the modern mainstream. As the study puts it: "The privileged composition of the marketing and advertising profession is further reinforced when we look at how people from AB backgrounds over index across all strata of our industry. The point here is that lack of social mobility and access to our profession consolidates the privileged outlook of marketing and advertising. This isn’t about what you do for a living now, it’ about what your parents did for a living and quite possibly what their parents did for a living too.”
And yet marketing and advertising professionals are seemingly unaware of their privilege - and that we view the world differently. For example, the average salary in advertising is £47,50018, and the average marketing salary ranges from £42,000 to £63,000 depending on the sector. The average personal income in the UK is just over £23,000. When asked to position themselves on the ‘rich/poor staircase’ with 0 being poorest and 10 being richest, those in the mainstream sample rated themselves an average of 4.8 and those in advertising and marketing at 5.5. So while advertisers and marketers see themselves as a bit better off than other people, they are still firmly of the belief (and under illusion) that they are positioned in the middle along with everyone else.
The conclusion would seem to be inescapable. We are disconnected from the mainstream, alienated from the lived experience of other people’s realities, and vastly overestimate our ability to transcend our own experience and worldview and understand mainstream aspirations. Simply resorting to our ‘intuition’ and extrapolating from our own personal experiences cannot bridge that gap.
The disconnected is compounded by less direct contact with people. Informed by exposure to a wide variety of markets, audiences, segments, and categories we agency folk are meant to understand people better, and to have superior understanding of culture both fast and slow (to borrow McCracken’s characterisation) than any enterprise service outfit. And yet without wishing to harken back to some kind of mythical Good Ol’ Days (or wishing to diminish the undoubted value of quantitative methods) the fact remains that much of the planning craft has become a zero consumer contact undertaking, with planners rarely being the do-ers of research.
My creative hero, is John Webster, who worked as creative director of Boase Massimi Pollitt (BMP). His work was the backdrop to my youth and for me he remains one of the greatest creatives. In fact, in a poll in 2000, no fewer than 10 of the 'best 100 ads of the century' voted for by the British public were by John Webster. At the time, planners at BMP did all their own qualitative research into rough work and as Paul Feldwick who worked with Webster remembers “he was especially interested in research, because I believe his motivation was always work that would get talked about excitedly in the pub or playground”. Sarah Carter also worked with him and tells in her book John Webster: The People’s Ad Man how Webster loved hearing about the lives of the people he was creating for and the anecdotes and the snippets of language the planners relayed as they sat on his office sofa. And so time and time again that direct line of contact and conversation between planner and audience, and then between planner and creative yielded advertising wonders.
Today, as Richard Huntingdon has bemoaned, we have a generation of planners who simply do not have the skills to facilitate group discussions, who if they do so are doing it infrequently, doing the ‘quick and dirty’ kind for pitches or to prove some creative wheeze the client isn’t buying, and for the most part doing it untrained in both interviewing, listening, and analysis skills. And for that I lay much of the blame on client organisations for withdrawing funding for robust agency research and driving a wedge between people and planners - all in the name of “objectivity”. Writes Huntingdon:
“Planners are left arguing the toss with researchers that, with a few notable and welcome exceptions, are not greatly practiced in the way creative ideas are conceived and brought to life. Moreover, by severing the link from consumer to planner to creatives and splicing together many more steps, stages and voices we have slowed down the flow of energy, insight and corrective feedback into the creative process from fibre optic broadband to a dodgy dial up service with a crossed line or worse to the pony express.”
And so it is that privileged, unrepresentative, disconnected and with an overinflated sense of its understanding and common values that marketing and advertising professionals come to rely on the sweeping platitudes of ‘Millennials’ and ‘Gen Z', happy to believe that people born within certain years are all the same, happy by implication as Prof Ritson has pointed out, to reject the concept of segmentation and of consumers holding different perceptions and experiences, and happy to believe that some kind of powerful, magical invisible force is at work that determines that people who are born in the same year will all have exactly the same opinions and attitudes.
When people talk about ‘millennials’ they usually seem to be talking about people born between 1980 and 1996. When they talk about ‘Gen Z’ they seem to usually be talking about people born between 1997 to 2013. This alone should already be setting people’s bullshit radars off. If it does not, Harry Guild has reminded us that the definition of ‘GenZ’ is so broad that it includes both Prince George and Lil Pump. And that those deemed to be ‘Millennials’ in the US represent a population so large (72 million people) that if it were a country it would be the 19th largest country in the world.
The nonsense of ignoring the behavioural and attitudinal nuances of a hugely heterogeneous population and collapsing them in Professor Ritson’s words, into one big, generic mess is revealed in BBH’s analysis of TGI data that I referred to earlier. Examining to what degree different populations express common attitudes and opinions, we find that drinkers of Orangina have more in common with each other than people in any of these generational confections.
The fact is that marketing and advertising professionals who believe that the accident of birth year defines the common character, values, sensibilities, needs, wants and aspirations of tens of millions of people are indulging in the marketing equivalent of astrology.
Why do we do this? Because lacking the ability or interest to imagine our way into the lives of others, we’d rather throw about labels and buzzword. It’s far easier to wang on about “Millennials” than actually do the hard work of understanding them.
The physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988) was one of the great minds of humanity and talked about the difference between knowing the name of something and actually understanding it. Pointing to the brown-throated thrush, he says:
“See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a halzenfugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird. You only know something about people; what they call the bird. Now that hrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way.”
Labels are a substitute for doing any actual thinking yourself. They give the illusion that you mean something specific but in fact you don’t at all. Similarly, just because we say “mums”, or “teens” or “millennials” or “LDA+” or “C2D” or “middle class” or “rural” or “elite” or “Tier 1” or “metropolitan media elite” or “opinion formers” or “car buyers”, or even “blokes” does not mean we ipso facto understand them. It just means we know what some people call other people. No more.
Even if we’re not resorting to the magic and superstition of generational marketing, we’re still confidently indulging in sweeping nay jaw dropping generalisations. I’ve been told that Germans (all 83 million of them) “are very rational”. And that the Chinese (all 1.4 billion) are “very literal”. If it existed, one would swear that these thick-skulled platitudes had been plucked from the pages of the Ladybird Book of Racist Cultural Analysis. Marketing and advertising professionals who think and talk like this would be well advised to take to heart the wisdom of Howard Gossage, one of the original Mad Men :
“Until advertising really believes that there is someone out there… we will never develop the personal responsibility toward our audience, and ourselves, that even a ninth rate tap dancer has. The audience is our first responsibility, even before the client, for if we cannot involve them, what good will it do him?”
This disconnect from so much of the real world directly affects our output. Good evidence for this comes from the work done by The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media at Mount Saint Mary’s University. Sidenote: It was Geena Davis’ experience of watching children's TV with her young daughter, and noting the absence of female character that led to the foundation of Institute. One of the many studies undertaken by the Institute examined representations of gender, race/ethnicity, LGBTQ+, disability, age, and body size in Cannes Lions ads from 2006-2019, with a focus on new findings from 2019. By its very nature Cannes quite obviously is not representative of the industry’s output. But many in the marketing and advertising community do look to it as the embodiment of the industry at its best, so the findings are telling:
In 2019 ads, male characters outnumber female characters two-to-one, dropping from a high of 40.2% female characters in 2014 ads. Male characters also have twice the screen time and speaking time as female characters.
Nearly twice as many male characters are shown working as female characters in ads (22.2% compared with 13.3%). Male characters are also more likely to be depicted as leaders and shown as possessing authority than female characters
More male characters are shown as funny than female characters (22.1% compared with 15.4%).
When it comes to sexualization, female characters are four times more likely to be shown in revealing clothing than male characters (10.8% compared with 2.2%), and nearly twice as likely to be shown as partially nude.
White characters are more likely to be shown working than characters of color (20.5% compared with 17.2%).
White characters are more likely to be shown as “smart” than characters of color (10.1% compared with 7.6%).
LGBTQ+ characters are virtually nonexistent. Only 1.8% of characters with a discernible sexual orientation in ads are LGBTQ+ compared to 10.0% of people globally.
Characters with disabilities make up only 2.2% of characters in 2019 ads, which is well below the 19% of people with disabilities globally.
In another study conducted in partnership with Google, the Institute also analyzed over 2.7 million YouTube videos uploaded by advertisers between January 1, 2015 and March 31, 2019. The analysis we accounted for over 550 billion views through May 31, 2019, to understand what people actually watched in 51 markets. Again, the findings are instructive:
Male characters were heard 60% of the time, while female characters were heard 40% of the time.
Retail (54%), Consumer Packaged Goods (52%), and Health Care (49%) videos had the most balanced gender representation in terms of female characters YouTube audiences heard during this period.
Female characters were almost 9% less likely to be shown with an occupation and 6% less likely to be shown in a leadership role.
Male characters were heard over three times more often in Automotive videos, with male characters being heard 76% of the time, while female characters being heard 24% of the time.
Male characters were heard nearly four times more often in Business & Industrial Markets videos, with male characters being heard 79% of the time, while female characters were heard 21% of the time.
Male characters were heard over one and a half more often in Technology videos, with male characters were heard 63% of the time, while female characters were heard 37% of the time.
Male characters were heard over twice as often in Finance videos, with male characters being heard 67% of the time, while female characters were heard 33% of the time.
We do not see minorities and we do not see women. We also don’t see older peopler. At advertising, public relations and related companies in the United States, more than 81% of employees are younger than 55, according to government data. In the UK, where the average age of employees in creative and non media agencies 35.9, only 7.1 % of the work force is 50 or older, despite 37% of the UK population being aged 50 and over.
Again, this has consequences for what we put out into the world. According to the New York Times, more than a third of the United States population is older than 50, but the group turns up in only 15 % of media images, according to research from the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). The report was based on a random sample of 1,116 images published or posted by popular brands and groups.
According to this report, while more than 53 million people older than 50 are employed, making up a third of the American labor force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But only 13 % of the images reviewed by AARP showed older people working. Instead, they appeared at home more than in any other setting, often in the company of a partner or a medical professional. Younger people were more likely to be featured with co-workers. Less than 5 % of the images showed older generations handling technology, even though the Pew Research Center has found that 69% of people between 55 and 73 own a smartphone. More than a third of the images analyzed by AARP portrayed younger people with technology.
What we include, exclude, represent, and distort matters beyond its impact on the old sales curve. Judith Williamson (who I will never get bored of reading and quoting) recognised and understood the potency of advertising:
“Advertisements are one of the most important cultural factors moulding and reflecting our life today. They are ubiquitous, an inevitable part of everyone’s lives… the images are inescapable. Pervading all media , but limited to none, advertising forms a vast superstructure with an apparent autonomies existence and an immense influences.. their very existence in more than one medium gives them a sort of independent reality that links them to our own lives; since they both share a continuity they constitute a world constantly experienced as real”.
For Williamson, this enormous superstructure constitutes a vast symbolic meta-system of both explicit and implicit meaning. And it is a system that conjures and trades in not just the meaning of products, but the meaning of people. And herein lies the danger. Writes Williamson:
“When people become symbols they need not be treated as human beings. This is an obvious point but it is probably little noticed how much of the human symbolism of advertisements carries over into real life… in all areas of life it is clearly very dangerous to see only what people mean”
In 2017 the UK the Advertising Standards Association (ASA) published a report entitled Depictions, Perceptions and Harm: A report on gender stereotypes in advertising that identified and detailed those dangers. Acknowledging that there are competing theories about the impact the media, and advertising in particular - the ‘mirror argument’ holding that advertising reflects values that already prevail in a cultural context, and the ‘mould argument’ holding that advertising moulds and impacts on the values of its target audience - the report did not hedge its bets:
“The weight of evidence suggests that, wherever they appear or are reinforced, gender stereotypes can lead to mental, physical or social harm which can limit the potential of groups and individuals. Research concludes that advertising can reinforce particular gender stereotypes which contribute to widespread assumptions and expectations about how people should look or behave according to their gender, and that these can become internalised. Overall, young children appear to be in particular need of protection from harmful stereotypes as they are more likely to internalise the messages they see. However, there is also significant evidence of potential harm for adults in reinforcing already internalised messages about how they should behave and look on account of their gender.”
Understanding people better serves both the old sales curve. But it also serves our first priority - ordinary people.
Perhaps our disconnect from the lives of others explains why we are not just silencing or marginalising voices, we’re hearing less of any voice. Evidence for this comes from Orlando Wood’s (truly excellent) book for the IPA, Lemon: A Repair Manual to Reverse the Crisis in Creative Effectiveness. This includes an analysis of 620 ads appearing in the UK’s long-running TV soap opera Coronation Street between 2004 and 2018. It highlights a significant shift in the style of advertising we are exposed to - and provides us with a fresh granularity of insight.
The analysis reveals a decline in the use of characters, sense of context, distinctive accents, ambiguity, wordplay, double meaning, and metaphor. It shows how advertising today demonstrates less self-awareness, is less self-referential, employs less implicit communication between people, deploys less cultural references, and fewer stories with a beginning, a middle and an end. Conversely, it reveals a greater use of voiceovers, monologue, more focus on things than people, more people as props not characters.
A quick caveat - none of this is to argue that pursuing understanding or ‘insight’ is a Trojan Horse or mandate for holding up a mirror to people’s lives. Sarah Carter tells the story of the making of John Webster’s most iconic ads - ‘Anniversary’, produced for the the UK’s Meat and Livestock Commission with the objective of promoting British meat. Targeting mass-market meat lovers it showed a day in the life of a 72 and 84 year old couple, against the backdrop of a down at heel seaside town. Probably one of the best examples of the neglected truth that people do not have to literally see themselves in an ad for it to be successful. But back to our disconnect.
So what are we to do? Certainly we need to start feeling the winds of reality to blow through our corridors. It makes me think of the way the ‘kitchen sink’ dramas of British cinema between the 50s and 70s with all their gritty realism, working class lives, regional accents, the drudgery of manual labour, backstreet abortions and all, presented a fresh, bracing alternative to the fictional celluloid comforts of the time. We could do with some of the relentless spirit of Ken Loach, who continues that tradition, demanding in films such as I, Daniel Blake, and Sorry We Missed You that we have the courage to look reality in the eyes. Or we could do with some of the fascination with the idiosyncrasies of ordinary life that photographer Martin Parr has brought to much of his work.
Of course more diversity is (and must be) part of the solution. The ethical case for diversity is inarguable. As Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” Steering businesses towards becoming fairer, more diverse, more inclusive places is a fundamental lever for steering society as a whole towards opening up opportunity (and dignity and rights) for all. It is not the only lever of change. But it is an important one.
However, equity, diversity, and inclusion also makes good business sense. In a speech he gave in 2017 entitled ‘Reflecting diversity, choosing inclusion’ given by Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England said:
"Homogenous groups that pay insufficient attention to minority views are vulnerable to biases, groupthink and over optimism. They are more likely to be influenced by the way information is presented (framing); and to stick with under-performing projects because of prior investments. Diverse groups can overcome these ills as they are more inclined to consider novel ideas and challenge each other, enabling them to infer cause and effect and to solve problems better. Diverse teams are also better able to adapt to changes and are more resilient. This is particularly important in a rapidly changing world, where information is super abundant and certainty is absent.”
And study after study, report after report provides compelling evidence of this phenomenon. For example, a 2015 McKinsey report on 366 public companies found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, and those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have returns above the industry mean. In a global analysis of 2,400 companies conducted by Credit Suisse, organizations with at least one female board member yielded higher return on equity and higher net income growth than those that did not have any women on the board. And research conducted into the performance of venture capital companies by Harvard Business School demonstrates that on all dimensions measured, the more similar the investment partners, the lower their investments’ performance. For example, the success rate of acquisitions and IPOs was 11.5% lower, on average, for investments by partners with shared school backgrounds than for those by partners from different schools. The effect of shared ethnicity was even stronger, reducing an investment’s comparative success rate by 26.4% to 32.2%.
Diversity benefits everybody. As Ezra Klein of the New York Times put it reflecting on an interview with Heather McGhee:
“If we grow up in a society cut up by racism, told again and again that our relationships, our policies are zero-sum, that if those people over there are going to progress, it’s going to come at our expense, that metaphor will lodge in us. We’ll become used to interpreting the data of this world in a zero-sum way. And so a society that needs to tell that zero-sum story again and again and again to justify racial hierarchy and oppression, to justify ill-gotten gains, will also become used to seeing the world through that lens. And so we will deprive ourselves - all of us - of so many opportunities to advance together, because we are so used to fearing that any other group’s gain will mean our loss.”
So more female creatives, more female senior management, and more ethic minorities in senior management roles can help build a bridge to reality. But we will also need to address the issue of class diversity and expand our diversity and inclusion efforts to improve the representation in management of employees from lower social-class origins. Simply having a somewhat more diverse bunch of toffs really isn’t going to change that much.
Even so, diversity cannot solve everything. There will still be plenty of times when we are not the audience, not the demographic, not in the life-stage, when we have no category experience to draw upon, or when we share profoundly different values or worldviews from our intended audiences.
Moreover, by our very nature we’ll be unable to escape the truth that we will always think and care about brands and advertising far more most people do. Most of the time people don’t think that much about brands, or care that much about brands. We meanwhile, are (obviously) paid to think and care a lot about brands.
Insight then is both our way in, and our way out. Planners shouldn’t be shy about this. It is our first superpower. And in an environment oversupplied with opinion, it is our source of authority. But I’m not interested in the parochial conversation around what items from the methodology menu we should pick. As Janet Morse has written, “We now have a rich menu of ways to access both the private, concealed realties and the public faces of humanness.” But I would caution those who work with research not to fall into the trap that those who work in research have - namely focusing on the means whilst losing sight of the ends. The ‘right’ methodology is no more of a silver bullet than the insight so many hope it will reveal. No, the issue is not one of methodology. The issue is one of structure, culture, and mindset before it gets close to being deciding between methodologies.
To that end, we could start by being less like Sinek and more like Loach. We could dedicate ourselves to serving up less unevidenced vanilla-flavoured wishful thinking dressed up with the minimum viable charisma and an appeal to our own vanities. We could jettison the dull, vapid representations of real people’s lives that look like they were sourced from a stock art library. And we could stop peddling the kind of corporate wishful thinking that airbrushes out all the contingency, strife, struggle, tension, and texture from the lives of real people and that denies as Huntingdon puts it, the “cultural earthquakes that surround our brands and the behaviour and beliefs of the real people upon which they depend.”
We could accommodate ourselves to the fact that the middle is where scale and fame lie and actually start taking an interest in it. Of course we must travel to the borderlands of culture. The poet Alison Hawthorne Deming has written about the richness and innovation that happens here: “In ecology the term "edge effect" refers to a place where a habitat is changing--where a marsh turns into a pond or a forest turns into a field. These places tend to be rich in life forms and survival strategies”.
However, as Alex Hesz has written, that cannot come at the expense of giving a shit about the middle. Of course we like the edges. New and exciting things happen at them. It’s attraction is not just an issue of pragmatism, but also one of self-identity. Many of us I suspect, would rather set ourselves on fire than think of ourselves creating for the mainstream. What after, would that say about us? Wouldn’t that make us mainstream? As Hesz puts it:
“We’re ignoring the mainstream professionally because we so often flinch from it personally.” And yet “The middle” as Hesz reminds us, “remains where scale happens. The middle is where fame happens. Proper, your-mum-knows-about-it, fame. The kind of fame where when you walk outside the office and ask people about it and they know what you’re talking about. So much of what the advertising industry does now, if we’re being honest, fails that most basic test. Simply put, the numbers just don’t back up the extent of our obsession with the outer edges. For every limited batch craft beer, there’s a lot of lager still drunk. For every gluten free loaf, we still get through a whole load of oven chips. This isn’t about traditional purchases versus new ones, either. For every new digital platform we coo over, Facebook remains, in effect, the whole internet for approaching half of all UK internet users, while Twitter is a tiny minority pursuit.”
Knowing where to look is but part of the solution. We must know how to look. Richard Huntingdon has some wonderful advice for better seeing and understanding the lives of those we serve:
“At a deep focal length we are able to understand and identify the broadest themes of humanity, the eternal drivers of behaviour and the cultural tensions of the moment. Here we see the thinking and work that moves culture, and that resonates because of its universality… At a shallow focal length, we empathise with and relate to the most intimate of experiences. Personal stories and the details of individual lives that resonate through proximity and relevance…”
For Huntingdon, the middle ground is the dead zone of cliche. The focal length of too much research. Of seeing without actually really seeing:
“We need to move far further away from our subjects so we can see and appreciate the vast sweep of humanity and able to mark the turning of culture. And at the same-time we need to get far closer to them, so we can press our noses against the glass of life, serving people as people, individual and idiosyncratic.”
But this is not a job for planning alone to solve. And we cannot deny creatives having a part in the solution. Creatives have of course, learned to hate creative development research. I get that. Ideas and craft reduced down to Captain Pugwash-eque animatics or storyboards. Moderators who can’t present creative work. Moderators who are unskilled in the art of moderating. Clients who cannot fathom that rough, incomplete work elects rough, incomplete consumer responses. Clients who subcontract decision-making to respondents who (gasp) cannot understand that it is only work in progress. Respondents who cannot divine the self-evident greatness of the ideas put before them. Researchers who do not know the difference between asking respondents to evaluate work and eliciting their responses to it. Researchers who do not distinguish between their findings and their recommendations. I say all this as somebody who began their career working as a qualitative researcher for five years.
But that doesn’t excuse creatives from refusing or having the chance to have any contact with their intended audience. Or to have no idea how people actually speak about how a brand or category fits into their lives (or not). Or to have only ever heard research ‘findings’ codified in Powerpoint but never heard a word of real consumer language as it is uttered.
I get that creatives detest creative development research. But upstream strategic research - where fragile ideas are not thrust into the woodchopper of lumpen moderating skills and consumer evaluation - is where the gold is found. But one must be realistic. The creative process these days more often than not feels like being trapped in the garbage compactor on the Death Star, with a rising level of ‘deliverables’ and the timeline walls impossible to stop closing in on us. So it would be foolish to expect creatives to attend every single interview and group discussion. But it surely isn’t too much to ask that they come to just a few?
Creatives who turn their noses up at the opportunity are missing out. James Webb Young was a copywriter at J. Walter Thompson in the USA. Beginning in 1912, he was in and out of JWT for 52 years, and was one of the principal intellectual influences on the development of the agency during that period. All the way back in 1940 he published a refreshingly slim book (weighing in at a mere 50 pages) entitled A Technique For Producing Ideas. It’s bizarrely neglected by the advertising industry yet in its pages we find the wisest, and crucially the most useful, writing on the subject of ideas: “An idea results from a new combination of specific knowledge about products and people with general knowledge about life and events.” There’s nothing like direct contact with consumers or provide that necessary raw material. And indeed every time I have persuaded a creative to attend some of these sessions, it’s never once proven to have been a waste of their time. Quite the opposite.
Creatives who simply view consumers through the lens of Instagram, Tick Tok memes, and what’s hot on Netflix kid themselves that they are connected with and have a deep and nuanced understanding of their intended audiences.
As for creatives who believe real people in the real world are morons whose opinions they can and should ignore, they might want to contemplate whether they should find another profession. It’s hard to do great work for people you despise.
Seen from this perspective, insight is a way of keeping ourselves - individuals and organisations - open to reality. Thermodynamics refers to what it calls ‘closed systems’. These are systems that are isolated and closed off from their surrounding environments. The Second Law of thermodynamics describes the tendency of these closed systems to ultimately reach an end state of equilibrium. This is the point at which the system has worn down, done its work, and has exhausted all its capacity for change and dynamism.
The most obvious exception to this law is life itself. Living systems are open systems that are active partners with their environments. Their systems stay open to, interact with, and adapt to their surrounding environment. They’re open to outside stimuli. And it is this open-ness that provides them with the ability to change over a period of time in response to the environment.
The organizational expert Margaret Wheatley has applied this knowledge of how the natural world organises itself to thinking about how businesses and organizations remain vital and dynamic: “To stay viable, open systems maintain a state of non-equilibrium, keeping the system off balances so that it can change and grow. They participate in an active exchange with their world, using what is there for their renewal. Every organism in nature, including us, behaves this way.”
A more honest, more clear-sighted understanding of people and the reality in which they live has much to offer the corporation. But let us not forget where our first responsibility lies. In the words of Richard Grossman, former director of Greenpeace in the US and a campaigner and writer against the legality of corporate authority:
"We have given corporations dominion over the sustaining of our lives. They have become sovereign citizens and we have become consumers. They concentrate power and wealth. They design and shape our society and world. They carve our goals and aspirations. They shape our thoughts and our language. They create the images and metaphors of our time, which our children use to define their world and their lives."
***
Brexit inflicted a profound and painful sense of cultural whiplash on the advertising profession. With a strong liberal leaning (92% of media agency employees voted remain in the 2016 EU referendum compared with only 48% of the active electorate) most of us just didn’t see it coming. So much for having a finger on the nation’s pulse. And having got a brutal lesson that their grip on daily reality was less sure than they’d assumed, London planners were sent scurrying out into the wilds of non-London to connect with real people.
So perhaps the pandemic we are all living through will finally force us to truly open our eyes and imagine our way into the lives of others. Certainly operating as a privileged and disconnected monoculture seems increasingly dangerous when the gaps within societies have widened. As The Lancet reports:
“One of the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic has been to illuminate far-reaching health and socioeconomic inequalities in many countries. The pandemic's impact has fallen disproportionately on the most vulnerable individuals and along racial, ethnic, occupational, and socioecomic lines. Inequalities in people's protection from and ability to cope with this pandemic and its tremendous societal costs stress the importance and urgency of the societal changes needed to protect population health and wellbeing in the future.”
Published in December 2020 by the UCL Institute of Health Equity Build Back Fairer: The COVID-19 Marmot Review argued that a decade of growing inequality in England partially explains why it has had one of the worst COVID-19 infection and mortality rates in Europe and risks emerging from the pandemic as an even more socially and economically divided nation:
Before the pandemic, life expectancy increases had stalled in England, gaps in healthy life expectancy were growing between wealthy and poor regions and individuals, and a decade of government austerity measures had enhanced regional inequalities in employment, poverty, and educational outcomes, as well as health.
England's inequalities are reflected in the COVID-19 pandemic. In March to July, 2020, COVID-19 mortality rates in the most deprived local areas were double those in the least deprived areas and the highest excess mortality rates outside of London during the pandemic have been in poorer regions, like the West Midlands, and North-West and North-East England.
Age-standardised COVID-19 mortality rates are substantially higher in frontline and lower-waged occupations than in office-based occupations. Higher transmission risk is linked to overcrowded housing and inability to self-isolate.
Mortality rates among racial and ethnic minority groups have been up to three times higher than those of the White population; even after accounting for demographic, socioeconomic, and underlying health factors. The risks of both contracting COVID-19 and of severe illness and mortality reflect overlapping structural determinants of health that are bred by inequality and transmitted across generations.
Students from poorer households have been less able to access online learning or private tutoring and a majority of teachers from the most deprived English schools reported that their pupils are 3 months or more behind in their learning.
But it does not end there. Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University and a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences writes:
“Unfortunately, as bad as inequality had been before the pandemic, and as forcefully as the pandemic has exposed the inequalities in our society, the post-pandemic world could experience even greater inequalities unless governments do something. The reason is simple: COVID-19 won’t go away quickly. And the fear of another pandemic will linger. Now it is more likely that both the private and the public sectors will take the risks to heart. And that means certain activities, certain goods and services, and certain production processes will be viewed as riskier and costlier. While robots do get viruses, they are more easily managed. So it is likely that robots will, where possible, at least at the margin, replace humans. “Zooming” will, at least at the margin, replace airline travel. The pandemic broadens the threat from automation to low-skilled, person-to-person services workers that the literature so far has seen as less affected—for example, in education and health. All of this will mean that the demand for certain types of labor will decrease. This shift will almost surely increase inequality - accelerating, in some ways, trends already in place.”
The plates of culture are grinding and shifting beneath our feet. Forces are at work in the land. Fissures are opening. The fractal consequences bloom. All that is solid melts into air. Never did splendid isolation look so untenable.
***
Sources
Photograph by Martin Parr
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