Why insight matters more than ever in the age of AI
Opinion
AI will make us faster, but insight will make us smarter. We need to stop seeing insight, strategy and marketing as costs and see them as investments in future growth, writes the IPA’s Simon Frazier.
Since the Industrial Revolution, businesses have consistently faced a trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness. In this trade-off, efficiency has always been viewed as the highest level of corporate optimisation by those of a more financial persuasion, while for those outside the financial sphere, efficiency is often lower down the priority list.
How many times have we heard the phrase “it used to be great until efficiencies took hold”? Probably too many times to count, but would we ever say, “that’s a great product, if only we could make it worse so that in this quarter, we can make it seem like we’ve done better than we have”? I don’t think so.
This is the essential challenge we are all facing in the industry today: the trade-off characterised so well by Rory Sutherland’s concept of explore vs. exploit.
Have we spent so much time focusing on AI’s exploitative capabilities to do less, but worse than before, and forgotten the fundamentals of what we’re here to do and what makes this industry so great?
Invest in future growth
If you’ve been in the industry for some time, you’ll have been through the Gartner Hype Cycle so many times with emerging trends and tech that it’s easy to just see AI as another fad like big data and NFTs, whereby most falter in the “trough of disillusionment” and then quietly disappear.
But AI is different. While other innovations have been focused on more explorative capabilities driven by a need to deliver something shiny and new for clients over and above competitors, the derivative nature of AI has meant that vast adoption and usage have homed in on the exploit mindset, where efficiency dominates, and the only question that seems to matter is how much we can save in the short-term.
But there’s a big problem with exploitation of resources: they’re finite, in the natural world just as they are in Lidl, where “Faux Malone” candles can be bagged in the middle aisle. And once they’re gone, they’re gone. There ain’t no getting them back.
‘But what’s this got to do with AI? That’s generative!’ I hear you shout.
But that generativity is also extractive. The reason AI systems seem so smart now is that they have been trained on decades of great research, innovation, and exploration.
Sure, there’s some absolute garbage in the mix too, but the perception of greatness only exists because of continual investment in quality research, great people and the way they think and understand the world.
Just as the name of the 80s alternative rock band Pop Will Eat Itself suggests, AI is already beginning to self-cannibalise. It is being increasingly trained on regurgitated AI-created and derived content, and with frightening stats like ‘almost 50% of people believe what AI tells them is true’ (KPMG) being circulated, we could end up in a very worrying place if we fall into the trap of believing that short-term cost savings will deliver long-term growth and replace investment in great talent, research and innovation.
You know it makes sense
That’s why at the IPA we have invested in building the brand-new Making Sense Unit: to celebrate the human connection which makes advertising so great; to encourage investment in long-term growth through bolstering human capabilities and enhancing them with AI for exploration; and to really bring to the fore the vital roles played by planners, strategists and insight professionals, while encouraging investment in growing capabilities in these spaces.
So often we hear the narrative “X client demands Y% savings due to AI year on year”, but how often do we counter this with “Why…and then what?”
Sure, AI can be great for automating mundane tasks that plague our day-to-day working lives, but we should also be thinking about the new and innovative things we could be doing to deliver better results and greater long-term sustainability for brands in the time afforded by AI-driven efficiencies.
Why are you different?
That’s the question we should always be asking of ourselves: if AI levels the playing field, how do you know if you’re playing on a Premier League pitch or a field that the local Sunday five-a-side would turn their noses up at?
What sets your organisation apart from others who employ similar tech? The people who ask the smart questions, who embrace curiosity and employ scepticism in fair measure – and who aren’t afraid to make mistakes and say “I don’t know” – that’s a true point of differentiation that AI can never replace.
All is not lost
It’s easy to get disenfranchised, but at this year’s IPA Insight Summit, one message of positivity from Zehra Chatoo (founder of Code for Good Now) cut through the noise louder than Taylor Swift live at Wembley.
She said insight is not being replaced by AI… It’s being super‑charged by it.
Crucially, insight is what keeps our work human. Because while AI can do a frighteningly good impression of intelligence, it still can’t explain why someone binge-watches comfort TV at lunchtime, gets a garden centre loyalty card at 28, or falls down a manosphere rabbit hole at 16. It can map the pattern, but it can’t comprehend the emotional story. And marketing without understanding consumers’ emotional journey is just automation with a media budget.
AI, Zehra demonstrated, wants answers; insight wants understanding. Her point was simple: when the machine gives you a neatly packaged answer in 0.3 seconds, that’s precisely the moment to stop and ask the second “why?”
Insight is the art of lingering, questioning, and embracing cynicism, while with AI, so often the focus is on the process-driven certainty of finishing, ticking off, and being definitive, whether right or wrong.
The reality is that great work requires both approaches. As Caroline Manning says, ‘AI is the Iron Man Suit, but that’s nothing without Tony Stark inside’.
The truth is in the texture
Sometimes the truth is uncomfortable, and the texture abrasive.
At the Insight Summit, we witnessed just why insight and human touch are so important through a fantastic piece of work by The Guardian and Differentology.
That work was called FAME – Fewer Ads, More Effective. The reason it resonated so well is that it confronted an uncomfortable truth about what a media world without insight but driven by optimisation might look like – user experience forgotten, ad load unbearable, brand damaged, revenue gone, and users somewhere else.
It’s the epitome of Cory Doctorow’s over-optimised en-ssshhhhh-ification (I can’t, in case my mum’s reading). But that’s not what they’re doing.
The Guardian has taken a long-term insight-led approach, centred on the old-fashioned rules of brand building and customer retention. It almost feels family-owned, like Numatic and vacuuming superstar Henry.
Straight-forward rules apply: make a great product, treat users well and focus on the long-term lifespan, not just quarterly returns. Sure, in the short-term, they may make less than an ad-loaded approach, but in the long-term, the results will speak for themselves. A machine might see ‘more impressions’ as ‘more successes’. But insight sees the flinches, frustrations and furrowed brows of angered users.
Humans don’t behave like datasets
Quality datasets are more vital than ever to understand human behaviour. So, if you take one thing away from this article, remember that AI will make us faster, but insight will make us smarter.
Tools may automate tasks, but they can’t engender quality where it just isn’t there.
More than ever, as an industry, we need to be thinking long-term in a short-term-focused world. Investing in quality research, the best materials, tools and building blocks and ultimately the best people to build the industry of tomorrow.
Taking learnings from Victorian housebuilders – we’re not building something to last the warranty period, but to last lifetimes, building legacy and future for generations to come – that’s true sustainability.
Insight is where the judgment lives, the empathy, the cultural intelligence, the spark, the big idea. It turns data into direction, direction into strategy, and strategy into things people actually really care about.
Simon Frazier is the associate director and head of marketing, data innovation and The Making Sense unit at The IPA