data vs hunch - beyond lecture at hyper island 2015
TRANSCRIPT
Data vs. Hunch Hyper Island Stockholm, 2015
It used to be really simple…..
HR Consultants
brand
HR
pr
finance
operations
strategy
marketing
learning
R&D
product development
sales
PR agencies
Accountants & Auditors
Management Consultants
Branding Agencies
Ad Agencies
Corporate Training Consultants
Sales Consultants
Product design & innovation consultancies
Direct Marketing Agencies
Direct Marketing Agencies
25 years ago the boundaries were clear
brand
HR
pr
finance
operations
strategy
marketing
learning
R&D
product development
Brand WebsiteBanner Ads
And then web 1.0 came along…..
sales
E-Commerce SEM
brand
HR
pr
finance
operations
strategy
marketing
learning
R&D
product development
sales
Brand WebsiteDisplay Ads
Social
E-Commerce SEM
And then web 2.0
E-RecruitingE-Learning
brand
HR
pr
finance
operations
strategy
marketing
learning
R&D
product development
sales
Digital Supply Chains
Social analytics / big data
E-learning
E-commerceSEM
Digital product design & testing
and then everything became digital
Digital Transformation / Change Management
Brand WebsiteDisplay AdsVideo MarketingMobile Marketing
SocialEarned Media “Fun” Apps
“Serious” Apps
Digital service design
Crowdsourcing
Co-Creation
Branding
PRManagement Consultancies
Data Analytics
Design
Social
Advertising
Digital
Accenture buying Fjord
W+K aces social with Old Spice, Three et al.
WCG buying predictive analytics firm
WPP buying AKQA
PR + Data Analytics
DigitalAdvertising +
Advertising + Social
+Management Consultancies
Service Design
So we all started getting into each others’ businessJust a few examples…..
Digital is no longer a department
And with digital pervasiveness comes some challenges for marketers…..
Marketing has become a battle
against metrics…
Because with digital came the rise of ever-increasing trackability
Accountability through ROI became a critical component in justifying and making digital marketing spend as
efficient as possible….
CTRs, conversion rates, UVs, shares, followers, downloads, A/B testing, attribution modelling,
etc. etc...
Marketing isn't used to talking about the “bottom line”
So how are we doing?
You’re more likely to survivea plane crash than click on a banner advert...Source: Solve Media
..and there’s only a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of
someone viewing your YouTube video...
Source: wistia.com
89% of TV ads not even noticed or remembered while 7% are remembered negatively...
Source: Dave Trott, regarding UK market
Is there anyone out there?
• 60 - 70% of marketing content goes
completely unused (Sirius Decisions)
• 30% of Microsoft’s 10MM pieces of content has never been visited (company audit)
• We are exposed to ~5,000 marketing messages a day and a social link has a half-life of 3 hours (various & Bitly)
Does anyone care?
• Average human attention span in 2000 was 12 seconds.
• Average human attention span in 2013 was 8 seconds.
• Average attention span of a goldfish is 9 seconds
So can data solve this, eliminating the waste by teaching us what works?
0 Exabytes
500 Exabytes
1000 Exabytes
1500 Exabytes
2017Dawn of Civilisation - 2003
We have gone from data scarcity to data abundance
Amount of data created
From Dawn of Civilisation to 2003
2017
And the ‘Internet Of Things’ means we’ve just started, leading us down the path to ‘perfect real-time knowledge’
200 million connected devices in 2000
By 2020 there will be 50 Billion things exchanging 40,000,000,000 terabytes
of data
© Copyright 2013 Beyond. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Algorithms / Data GrowthExponential Digital
Combinational
Mobile / IOE / Metcalfe’s Law
APIs / Web Services
Credit: Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, MIT
The 1st machine age: muscle power was automated The 2nd machine age: cognitive powers are being automated
So will the marketing of the future be data-driven, automated, programmatic, real-time, predictive, and hyper-
personalised?
Leading some marketers to question...
Where is the room for creativity in marketing today, when data is all the boardroom cares about?
© Copyright 2013 Beyond. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Don’t forget that a world that is becoming obsessed with data is still run by emotions
© Copyright 2013 Beyond. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
price = what the market wants to pay book value = what accountants think it’s worth
market price to book value - s&p 500 - 1979-2011
When emotions that drive behaviour change, algorithms fail
Four tips for finding a balance between data & creativity
1. Understand what data is and isn’t good for
Too often people look for data to provide the “silver bullet” insight, and end up frustrated by lack of answers.
We’re taught that math equals fact, and that to measure something is to understand it.
But the reality is data is a lot more subjective than we think.
There are no silver bullets
With more data, we actually get more uncertainty
“With more data, you get more spurious correlations, more false positives, and erroneous answers. If the quantity of
information is increasing by 2.5 quintillion bytes per day, the amount of
useful information almost certainly isn't. Most of it is just noise, and the noise is
increasing faster than the signal.” Nate Silver, The Noise & the Signal
Use data to define the problem, not give you the answer "If I had one hour to save the world I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution"
2. Use different data sets to look at the problem through as many lenses as possible
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In a famous Indian fable, a group of blind men touch an elephant to learn what it is like. Each one feels a different part, but only one part, such as the leg or the tusk. They then compare notes and learn that they are in complete disagreement.
Relying only on the data your organisation is accustomed to collect blinds you to truths outside of your experience.
Don’t just rely on the data you can easily get
Brand insights
Market/category Insight
Consumer insights
Digital/Tech insights
Toolbox: Social listening Web analytics Focus groups Behavioural & attitudinal surveys User observation Ethnographic research
Toolbox: Competitor analysis Financial analysis Market sizing & fundamentals Trends & forecasts
Toolbox: Digital value creation analysis Channel and touchpoint diagnostics/optimisation - search, social, content, UX Technology strategy and forecasts Data strategy
Toolbox: Positioning analysis Brand architecture analysis Brand perception analysis
Get a good tool box
Mix your quant and qual, your direct and indirect
3. Be very clear about where data ends and strategy begins
Data shows us the world as it is, not how it could be
Idea Management
Strategy
Research & Analytics
Information & Product Design
Strategy works from a basis of objective data but in order to achieve
previously unmet goals it must speculate into the subjective.
What we will createWhat it is
What can be
Objective
Subjective
“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do” Michael Porter
Focus Questions
Most of the time there will be multiple insights that can be drawn from the data. Strategy is all about choosing the path that is most likely to fulfil your goal, with the resources you have available. That’s different from choosing the most interesting insight.
4. Don’t feel guilty for taking a creative leap beyond the data
“The origins of an insight are usually to be found in numbers. That's how we know an insight to be more
than airy whim…
But, except to the supernaturally numerate, numbers seldom sing spontaneously…
[The] strategist who comes up with an immaculate and scrupulously accurate relief map of the brand and its
market - and absolutely nothing else - will not be greatly loved by the creative group…
By definition, a good creative brief contains a bold hypothesis. To generate hypotheses you need to
speculate: you need to progress from the known to the unknown. But you cannot paint the future in the colours
of the past. Other people's imaginations need to be engaged…” Jeremy Bullmore
Speculate with hypotheses
Insights
FACT / DATA: Statistics show that 90% of people feed their pets twice a day
OBSERVATION: They tend to feed them at breakfast and dinner
INSIGHT: People feel guilty eating in front of their pets
FOCUS QUESTION: How might we show moments where owners “give in” to their pets? How are they different
Insights
Understand what drives behaviour
An insight seeks to understand 'the why' rather than 'the what'. Why do people think the way they think or do the things they do...... as opposed to what they actually end up doing.
Insights
Focus Questions
Focus questions join together the insights and the brief. They summarise the strategy in the form of a question that the creative team can answer through ideation.
Feeding the creative team with the synthesis of the problem
Focus Questions
Why is a Good Focus Question Like a Refrigerator?
Because the moment you look into it, a light comes on.
Focus questions lead to inspiration and interaction. Your mind should start filling with possibilities as soon as you read them.
Focus Questions
How can a focus question say so much with so little?
Through the understanding of the feelings your audience associate to certain words. Words carry strong implicit meaning and, as such, play a major role in how we perceive a problem.
Through the use of metaphors, analogies and similes that can re-phrase the core tension you have found in your insight.
Through using unexpected associations between contrasting or disparate words or ideas.
By avoiding the direct or explicit and using creativity to phrase the problem in an inspiring way.
Focus Questions
• The brief phrased as a question.
• A collection of stats and data from your analytics
A Focus Question is NOT
Strategy
Giving creative a framework
“Creativity loves constraints. It’s why pictures have frames and
sonnets have fourteen lines. It’s why Henry Ford set pricing for
his cars so low, because he knew that ‘We make more
discoveries concerning manufacturing and selling
under this forced method than by any other leisurely
investigation’.” Eric Schmidt
Strategy
Giving creative a framework
“When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination is taxed
to its upmost and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom the work is likely to sprawl”
T.S. Eliot
creativity?
Now you have a strategic framework and some potent focus questions, what’s the best way to harness a lot of ideas?
Clients are grappling with the pace at which technology changes and we need to adapt our creative process to meet the new challenges clients throw at us
Challenge 1: The work is more complicated than ever
E-RecruitingE-Learning
brand
HR
pr
finance
operations
strategy
marketing
learning
R&D
product development
sales
Digital Supply Chains
Social analytics / big data
E-learning
E-commerceSEM
Digital product design & testing
Remember how many types of briefs we are trying to solve with digital now
Digital Transformation / Change Management
“Fun” Apps
“Serious” Apps
Digital service design
Crowdsourcing
Co-Creation
Brand WebsiteDisplay AdsVideo MarketingMobile Marketing
SocialEarned Media
Challenge 2: New technologies requiring new agency skill-sets are appearing every day.
So how do you meet the needs of an ever more complex tech / marketing lanscape?
Rather than limiting creative thinking and idea generation to a creative department
Form custom cross-disciplined creative teams from across the agency for each brief who have a variety of skills, perspectives and experience.
Use ideation methods that enable everyone to contribute
Idea Management
Make sure the team follows these creative principles:
Think big & encourage wild ideas
Get all your ideas out
Quantity is a condition for quality
Postpone critical thinking and judgement
One conversation at a time
Build on each other ideas by saying yes and…
At Beyond we use a process called Applied Creativity
We define Applied Creativity as a data driven process that enables cross-discipline collaboration resulting in more
informed creative output.
What are the benefits of taking this approach?
Benefit 1: Different brains working together can tackle problems from every angle
Benefit 2: New ideas often come from combining ideas from different disciplines in orginal combinations
Benefit 3: When all the disciplines are involved in conceiving the ideas, they can implement them quicker
Benefit 4: This approach liberates and makes the most of your talent.
Thanks!Nils Mork-Ulnes Head of Strategy
Alex Hunting Strategist
Charlie LyonsGM, London