Follow your arrow

As ongoing arguments between agencies and the Government Procurement Service continue, Route’s James Whitmore says, as with just about everything in life, cricket shows the way…

I am not sure if it counts as an epiphany but we might have something to learn from test match cricket and country & western music.

Recent spats between agencies and the Government Procurement Service, together with stirrings amongst commentators that the focus on measurement can be to the detriment of creativity, suggest that all is not rosy in the media garden.

It is difficult to feel much empathy with any of the protagonists but let’s try.

On the one hand, the government department appears to wish to determine the worth of an agency based on a rigid set of metrics that seek to balance the value of an agency’s thinking with the cost of that advice. The danger with creating norms is that you are almost bound to gravitate to a mush in the middle. It is inevitable that price will end up as the most compelling variable, no matter how you play around with the maths of the overall equation. So, the government does not value creative thought (contrary to its stated aim to promote the “knowledge economy”) and is determined to price it as any other commodity.

Yet, the agency world is complicit in the pretence that everything is so knowable it might be measured. They say that the return on investment in communications is infinitely quantifiable and may be used to predict the performance of future spends. The purchase of media can be based on real information about contacts and actions; therefore buying may be “programmatic”. Again we’re heading into a mush of the commonplace. If we always do what is proven to “work” we will gravitate to repeating what we do. It is hard to see where creativity fits into this – and why the advice of an agency should have special claims for value.

It is not so much a fight to the death as a joint suicide pact.

As with just about everything in life, cricket shows the way.

A game that is characterised by long periods of inaction interspersed with lightning-quick bursts of activity has done much to integrate technology with its decision-making. The objective is to reduce or remove human error on the part of umpires who, unaided, would rely on the visual impression of a fraction of a second to inform verdicts about the fate of a batsman.

There are two principal techniques to determine whether the ball has hit the bat; hotspot and the snickometer. Hotspot detects the heat generated by the friction created when leather hits willow. The snickometer picks up the sound that the ball makes if it touches the bat, the pad or the body and aims to discriminate between the various possibilities.

In practice, only hotspot has been used to aid judgement in test matches because only it is able to render immediate “return-path” readings. The second measure, the snickometer, is considered inadmissible because the analysis takes too long to produce – and that would interrupt the flow of the game and upset the broadcasters. What has become apparent is that the short-term reading of hotspot is often at variance with both the naked-eye view of the umpire and the longer-to-generate evidence of the snickometer.

Despite these misgivings, hotspot was used throughout the recent Ashes contest, presumably because people are in thrall of data, “as it’s there and we can use it”, and not because they were prepared to back their own judgement and think for themselves. Mercifully, the return series will see hotspot taking a back seat whilst the technologists look to regroup and produce new improved metrics based on what they have learned from the underperformance of the present set.

Heaven forefend that the media industry might question its fixation with short-term, immediate measures. We have the data; so let’s make some charts. And few clients will want to hang around for the results of the snickometer if they can build their careers on hotspot. “Mutually assured destruction”, I think it is called.

The danger is that we are compelled to understand the most recent activity using only the information that is immediately available and fit our opinions to match those readings. Who will benefit from a longer view? For example, it is not immediately apparent that it is in anyone’s interest to conduct a review of the £5 million they spent on marketing in, say, 2010 – three years ago – despite the fact that it offers extremely fertile ground for learning. The brand is the only constant; the agency and client teams will have changed. Perhaps the answer is a broader conversation, CEO to CEO.

If decision-making is to be the result of what pops out at the bottom of a spreadsheet, how might someone justify an interpretation based on what their eyes tell them or what their experience or instinct suggests?

For a mirror of just how risk adverse we have become, look no further than country music – the last bastion of redneck conservatism. Chanteuse, Kacey Musgraves’ new single, has supposedly upset the establishment by suggesting that we,

Make lots of noise
Kiss lots of boys
Or kiss lots of girls
If that’s something you’re into
When the straight and narrow
Gets a little too straight
Roll up a joint, or don’t
Just follow your arrow
Wherever it points

It isn’t Shakespeare but you get my somewhat laboured allusion. If cricket and country music can challenge their conventions, perhaps we should too.

Good luck to the IPA and government in their conversations. Both sides have an opportunity to think a little differently. It will be interesting to see if they do.