Where to Find Insights

Working in the business of measuring advertising, I cannot turn off thinking about media implications when I am consuming content. I assume this would be the same for all occupations - a hairstylist will always discreetly sneak a glance at every single person's hair that they meet, an architect will always survey every building or room layout they walk into. So even when I'm watching television or surfing the Internet or flipping through a magazine, I inevitably end up studying the ads. This makes for great entertainment when normal consumers usually tune out. More than often, I wonder how the creator of the advertisement came to the decision to produce that particular ad - since I work in consumer insights, I'm more preoccupied with the 'why' and where it came from. Why is it that this particular brand chose to slam its competitor in a side by side comparison whereas this other brand decided to do a funny, irrelevant commercial with a talking animal or cute puppy? Especially if they belong in the same category, this clearly indicates that there are two different types of audiences they are trying to attract with the same product. One is rational, one is emotional. Insurance is a great example of this - some brands are dry and to the point, invoking an air of professionalism and no-nonsense and the majority lately seem to be based in silly humor. But both still want you to buy insurance.

If you end up studying the ads long enough, you can kind of get at how they came to an 'insight'. Lately, I feel like creatives are becoming way too meta. This isn't necessarily a bad or good thing, just an observation. I feel as though creatives are literally spelling out their insights in the advertisement, versus using it to portray an insight. I just recently saw a Domino's or some pizza commercial where the narrator talks about thoughts which normally I would hear in a brainstorming insight or strategy meeting, not in the actual ad. He was talking about how they could lie and say that getting pizza signifies that it's the weekend and so if you order it, you'll instantly get that downtime mood. A little slice of heaven, perhaps. I guess the insight came from how people love ordering pizza when they feel like relaxing, not cooking and chilling out, which is usually during lazy days e.g. the weekend. Therefore, to capitalize on that feeling of relaxation and downtime, order pizza on a Wednesday and it'll feel like the weekend! Similar to drinking a Corona and feeling like you're on a beach, this isn't a new concept and it intuitively makes sense. What was funny to me was the commercial was basically the narrator explaining that concept and then some - that pizza won't get you to feel like it's the weekend, but it's what you do with that time, cut to shot of happy family enjoying pizza. So order pizza, but spend that time wisely, is what the commercial is trying to instruct. I didn't understand the concept at all. I imagined a frustrated brainstorming session where the team is tasked with finding the emotional hook to pizza, and someone says, 'It's just fucking pizza. There's no emotions. It's what happens when you're eating pizza, family dinners, quiet nights in, etc.' And there's your ad. On one hand, I get that it's time now for brands to be purely transparent about their intentions - to sell you their stuff, and not hide it behind fluff. However, there's just a certain tinge of patronization in the ad, it kind of feels to me like they're saying that they studied you and are now telling you what you feel and why you should buy their product. That isn't supposed to be what an insight serves. An insight is supposed to shed light on a piece of information, and then create something new from it, not regurgitate it.

Hate to bring up the over-cited Dove but also now the recent Pantene commercial from the Phillipines - but those to me were good examples of using an insight and running with it. You find out women are insecure about their looks and don't see themselves the same way other people do? Do a test where you ask women to describe how they see themselves and how other people see them and spot the differences. That takes the insight and tells a story from it. For Pantene, it's been an age old complaint that women feel that if they act too emboldened, they're considered bitches as opposed to if you were a man, it'd be fine. Cue last year's whirlwind of feminism, Sheryl Sandberg, Marissa Mayer, the countless articles addressing the topic in The Atlantic, NY Times, NY Mag. Even Beyonce's new album was used as an example of feminism and whether it was different for black women. This had nothing to do with shampoo, but it had everything to do with women and women's rights. Pantene grabbed that opportunity and jumped on it - showcasing their product in the background. Another viral hit (I sometimes wonder, if 'viral' just means heralded by the ad/media world, whereas regular consumers barely bat an eyelid). Whether or not it'll help push sales of their shampoo off the shelves, I can't say. But it did get them attention and attached them as a brand and product that 'gets' women. So it was a success for the brand, if success doesn't always have to mean sales.

The fact is, there are hundreds of insights to be found while watching television. I come across a dozen every commercial break. Groups of people had to sit around, cracking their collective brains trying to figure out what to say in their next commercial and it all comes through perhaps somewhat diluted, but lately, pretty clear in every single commercial I see. Why wouldn't I just glean insights from watching a few commercials? It's the same as curation really - I'm watching the end results of months of research coming together in a professionally put together sizzle reel, so to speak. What makes this less academic than sourcing it from a whitepaper? People tend to get obsessed with trying to come with the insight by themselves from scratch, in a roomful of data points - something revolutionary and the big 'a-ha' (hence the title of this blog). You don't really need to. You can if you want. But information is out there for the taking - why not just tune in?

Overheard on Twitter

Everyone that's bored and on the Internet would've read about the latest PR fiasco from Justine Sacco, and right off its' tail, Gogo wireless. Her tweet in itself, while definitely un-PC, has probably been uttered by a slew of comedians or drunk people during parties. That's my whole point entirely. Look at those scenarios. Context. You cannot capture context in Twitter. Twitter and any other social content curation websites are the worst at providing context. You pluck a sentence from a conversation and it's very easy for it to sound horribly worse than it is. That's why 'Overhead in....' websites are hilarious because you don't really know the full story but pick one out of every five sentences and you can turn it into a 'That's what she said' nudge-nudge joke quickly.

Twitter allows people to retweet their tweets with no relation to any prior conversation. Anyone who cares about their brand, be it corporate or personal, have to, despite how annoying it is, be aware of this. While this woman is in PR and probably has some exposure to the public, I am sure she never realized she would get picked up by the media. For example, if I'm on the street and I do something ridiculous, say, being engrossed in texting and walk into a pole, I realize that I am public domain. Literally anyone can take a photo or record me and that would be the end of it. Never mind that I was on my phone for a serious emergency, the first instinct anyone would react to when watching a video of me walking into a pole while texting would be ridicule.

I find it fairly impossible to present research that isn't unbiased. There is a difference between presenting data points, which yes, can be factual, and telling a story with data points. When storytelling, you have no choice but to form a string of information together, thereby omitting other information or building up a string of sentences to form a point of view. That's not unbiased. That's you picking a lens in which to tell your story. It can be based in facts - but it's still biased. I didn't grow up in the US, so I visit a number news sites that are non-American - some UK and some Asian. I have noticed that the same news stories can be told in entirely different perspectives, using the same facts but with nuances of words that change the story completely. I've noticed in more extroverted cultures, a quiet person can be described as 'withdrawn' whereas more introverted cultures use the word 'reserved'. Notice how this switches the connotation describing the person.

Back to the original story. In the past, it might have been that everyone was looking for their five minutes of fame, uploading photos and videos to try and strike Internet fame (evocative of settlers looking for 'liquid gold' in the Wild Wild West). Today, one would actually have to avoid it. At any step, you could explode into Internet. Your publicly shared photo on Facebook might be used for a post on Buzzfeed, a brand could pick up the tweet you hashtagged and retweet it to their million followers. The world is watching and waiting to pounce. I have several social media sites and while I am not consciously vetting my responses - I am always aware that they can be uncovered one day, in which case, I would probably suffer the same fate as the woman above because somehow, something I wrote or took a photo of would be taken out of context. I would probably delete everything, cover my tracks and try to start over. But in the mean time, I constantly remind myself that this stream of content I publish online that for some reason I feel is private, might be discovered one day.