6 Ways For Marketers To Save Human Insight

Data plays an ever more important role in marketing: We can microtarget behaviours and demographics, and monitor in real time. But do we rely on it too much?

The pace of change is fast and accelerating, rapidly changing the business environment. The pursuit of endlessly better results in a challenging macroeconomic climate is pressure-testing executives, none more so than the CMO, whose median tenure has now shortened to just 26.5 months, nine months less than just a year ago.

So it’s never been more important for CMOs to demonstrate the effectiveness of their work rapidly and accurately. For a generation of marketers, this has been made possible through readily accessible real-time dashboards capitalising on more abundant and precise data, improved ad technology, and seemingly better attribution models.

But are we shifting the balance too far in the direction of data over gut; instant over investment? Are we draining brand equity without replenishing it?

Things Have Changed

When I grew up in advertising in the early 2000s, we knew remarkably little. Audience figures were vague, and campaigns were typically designed to build brands over time. Instinct and empathy overrode the few “data” sources we had. Precise targeting wasn’t possible, but it was never a problem. A reasonable degree of wastage was a good thing since it helped build brands beyond the target audience. The big outdoor buy or full-page spread implied confidence much like the deliberate over-engineering of a vaulted marble bank lobby.

Digitisation has changed the way we approach marketing. We can overlay data more accurately than ever to microtarget behaviours or demographics more tightly than ever. We can establish the last touch and attribute success to a single action. We can monitor in real time and optimise dynamically. We can see where money works harder. Or at least we assume we can. Abundant data has convinced a generation of marketers that we now know what works.

I believe we’ve come too far; that we’re scientifically analysing something that is irrational and complex. We’re outsourcing gut when we should be confident in our convictions. It’s time for us to regain the human edge. Here are six ways:

1. Data-supported (not data-driven) insights: For a word used as frequently as insights, there are remarkably few in advertising. They do not aggregate down from spreadsheets, they are not correlations or statistical anomalies. They are magical moments of enlightenment that are observed rather than manufactured.

Data plays a vital role in validating insights, but it will never discover them. We need to rebel against the idea of “data-driven” insights, and establish that insights are rare but transformative.

2. Data doesn’t supplant judgement: A friend who works in A&R for a record label was instinctively brilliant at her job, having spent many years at gigs, listening to the chatter around schools, clubs, and online, and gaining a sense of which new bands counted.

She no longer does that. She inputs data, monitors trends with software, and enters tunes and tempos into systems that measure the probability of success. She now performs worse than she’s ever done, but with data-based evidence, her role has never been more secure.

Thanks to data it’s never been easier to be rational. It’s hard to be fired for making bad, yet very rational, decisions. But it’s never been harder to be irrational. Making decisions on a feeling is risky regardless of outcome.

3. Avoid the McNamara fallacy: Former U.S. Secretary of Defense General McNamara stated that we tend to measure what we can measure most easily, not what matters most. We then forget about the things that are harder to measure, even if they’re important. Nowadays, we also forget about the metrics we can neither change quickly or attribute tightly to the activity we undertake.

Even today it’s hard to measure how much people like an ad or to monitor brand likability. It’s tough to get a handle on purchase intent in any statistically useful way. Even if you could measure these things accurately, you can’t show you’ve affected them directly. Most worryingly, they take a long time to shift. The vital brand and company metrics such as Net Promoter Score or top-of-mind awareness are awful metrics for CMOs to focus on in a time-stressed world.

So marketers focus on the measurable, changeable, and attributable. This creates a culture of obsession around numbers of video likes, rises in Twitter followers, Shares, Views, Click-through rates, and so on. But do these things matter? Some studies show the value of a Facebook “like” to be as much as $214.81, others suggest it’s as little as zero.

4. Distinguish between correlation and causation: There is a lot of false wisdom and a lack of critical thinking in advertising. Some believe the act of liking Coca-Cola’s page on Facebook creates an audience who are more likely to become heavy Coca-Cola drinkers, where common sense would suggest that it’s people who are heavy drinkers who are more likely to favourite a page. If we show mobile ads to someone and they buy a Lexus that day, has the ad caused the viewer to buy the car, or did we just ratify that our targeting was appropriate?

Ad people are infamously those in school who liked art, drama, or languages, and hated maths. We’ve grown up with a cultural slant towards ideas rather than logic, people rather than calculations, and as we’ve grown roles requiring analytical skills and proficiency in mathematics, we’ve struggled to recruit the right talent. Our general education is low, but our confidence is lower. To point out false causation, or to challenge the methodology of tests generated solely to support a dubious hypothesis, is beyond most people in advertising. So we’re digesting counterintuitive findings and doubting ourselves because graphical forms of data look indisputable while anecdotes and experience feel vulnerable.

5. Embrace wastage: We need to become more comfortable with not knowing everything. People act irrationally and buy products for different reasons at different times. Above all, they buy as a result of the cumulative effects of billions of actions over a long period.

I once did a school project on designing a car. I phoned BMW and they sent me a delightful brochure. Other companies I contacted heard my young voice and didn’t bother. I now own a high-end BMW. It wasn’t that brochure that made it happen, but it was one small part in more than a decade’s exposure to their products, PR, and advertising that culminated in my choice.

In our current short-term thinking, that exposure would be seen as wastage. We’ve entered a period where every purchase decision is attributed only to one thing (typically the last thing I did before buying), which is then dialled up in the false belief that it’s either more effective at creating the sale or at converting it.

6. Stop draining the funnel: The effect of all this is to create a culture of lower-funnel activity. What sort of CMO would have the audacity to use mobile for beautiful images that don’t lead directly to create sales, or to run an ad that doesn’t force a click to find out more? It must be hard to justify sponsorship or branding with the focus now on endlessly finding ways to squeeze out more sales, rather than replenishing the funnel for future consumption. Our digital lives reflect this endless chasing of attention with special offers and sign-up screens, not the lure and confidence of a brand with time to seduce us.

We Need To Find A Balance

I love data, its abundance and speed. To ignore it is to be purposefully ignorant, but data is not the only tool we have. For one, the more we have, the more we know we don’t know, but we need to be comfortable knowing what we can’t see. Things that have never been done before may not have an ROI, but that doesn’t mean they are not vital.

We need to embrace all the tools we have, but, above all else, we all need to understand data, to know when it’s wrong, when it’s not helpful, and when to use it to our advantage, to support the irrational, risky, outlandish decisions that our heart is telling us to make. If we are good at our roles, we won’t be wrong, but we won’t know why.