Learning our own lessons

It is remarkable how much we have learned about human behaviour and its causes in the past decade, writes David Brennan, founder of Media Native – but what’s even more remarkable is how little we apply them to our own business.

The best decision I have ever taken in my entire life was when I rejected my initial degree choice of economics, after just three weeks of stultifying ennui studying the cold, hard and already improbable world of perfect competition and full employment, and switched to psychology.

Since then, I have seen my fascination in the complexities and quirks of human behaviour continue to be regularly shaken, stirred and stimulated, as we learn more and more about what drives it and how we can better apply that unfolding knowledge.

I had always assumed that my love affair with psychology would end on graduation, but I have been blessed to have been subsequently granted a 35 year career in media research and strategy, which has allowed me to peek, prod and probe into the recesses of the human mind and put the insights into practice.

So, in the last decade or so alone, we have witnessed some fantastic insights into the various ways the output of our industries – media, advertising, marketing, research – actually work; they have definitively proven they do work, but often through means which were intuitive or implicit rather than conscious.

We now have a much better understanding of the powers of emotion, sub-conscious processing, context, implicit memory, social pressures and storytelling – to name but a few – and how they combine to influence behaviour and drive our business performance. We have seen some fantastic examples of how our industry has harnessed these insights to create brands, campaigns, communications and technological change, all of which have been achieved through a powerful combination of digital innovation and analogue creativity.

Fortunately, we also have the means to measure and evaluate just how successful we have been. Despite having more data than ever before – and increasing at a faster rate than ever before – it all appears to lead to a broad consensus. Advertising works, marketing adds real value to a company’s bottom line and media channels are evolving to become a thriving part of the new digital landscape.

So why aren’t we shouting it from the rooftops?

I think part of the answer is that we constantly feel like we’re on the back foot. As we face a daily barrage of facts, opinions, data, news, predictions and analysis, it is really hard to take a couple of steps above it all and take in the broader view.

We are too busy constantly shifting position and processing information. We see effectiveness study after effectiveness study prove the value of clients’ media investments, but we fret over which media channels win or lose. We celebrate innovation, talent and performance on an almost daily basis and yet we hear constant predictions about the death of just about every aspect of the industry that nurtures such accomplishments.

I also think it is because, as an industry, we have often failed to put the new knowledge we have gained into practice ourselves. I have four specific examples to make my case, but I could have selected many others. They all point to the same contradiction; we understand more than ever about what lies behind the power of communication, context and content to build brands, influence audiences and make money and yet we virtually ignore those lessons when we go about our daily business:

1. Look at how we talk to each other. Pretty much every presentation I see in media is PowerPoint-bland, full of numbers and ‘funnels’ and based almost entirely on the flawed assumption that our peers in business must not be like these gullible consumers, and will only ever make logical decisions based on firm evidence and rational evaluation of the consequences.

2. Look at how we do business. We are in a people-led business and yet our search for short-term efficiency gains leads to a misguided belief in automation (and ,indeed, personalisation). So, we have programmatic buying and addressability and real-time planning as the buzz-phrases of the day.

We operate on targets that are incredibly short-term and often irrelevant. We have attempted to fit the business we do into a spreadsheet rather than properly account for the elements that offer real value in the longer-term and/or on a deeper level. We are often glued to our analytics dashboards, responding to the slightest quiver of the needle, whilst often oblivious to some of the more profound, longer-term changes that are happening to our business; and to our consumers.

3. Look at how we have used technology. I believe that the digital revolution has been a massive enabler of change in our business and I am genuinely excited by what is still to come. I even believe that we may be close to the tipping point in the revolution, from short-term (which, as Nicholas Negroponte famously reminded us, we always tend to overhype) to the long-term phase.

However, it has taken us two decades to get there and, in part at least, I believe it is because our approach to the possibilities opened up by digital technology have tended to be quite literal, linear and rational…and not at all fully responsive to the consumer and their deeper needs.

That is why we have been slow to really exploit the benefits of convergence. It is why social media platforms often get issues of privacy and access (e.g. to advertisers) so wrong. It is why – even now – the talk is still predominantly about disruption and replacement, rather than synchronicity and enhancement.

4. Look at how we justify our existence. It still fascinates me to see the resilience of the old-fashioned metrics being used to track our performance. Brand and campaign tracking still generally rely on traditional (and largely discredited) survey techniques based on claimed behaviour; meanwhile, we relentlessly search for the next engagement measure, despite the last one often being only loosely correlated with bottom-line financial performance.

Our need to justify the value of the work we produce is being driven by the pressures of auditing and procurement, but surely we can come up with better ways to justify our existence than econometric modelling and marginal efficiency gains (although both have generally cast ‘mainstream’ media investments in a favourable light in recent years; certainly more than might have been expected this far into the digital revolution) but the real reasons for our success are often camouflaged by the density of the numbers.

I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with this, apart from to say that I have learned so many lessons in the last ten years or so, about what influences human behaviour and drives our business performance, but it still often seems as if it all has something to do with ‘out there’. After all, we have our spreadsheets and dashboards and KPIs; what more do we need?

I know there are many examples of agencies, brands and media owners who have embraced the ‘out there’ and achieved massive payback as a result. But, I also know that there are many organisations in our world who still embrace the logical, linear, certainties of algorithms, big data, procurement targets and traditional metrics. And, as the world of economics has taught us, they are never enough. Well, unless you’re Google, that is.

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