Insight shouldn’t be the final hurdle in advertising. It should be in the room from the start.

Advertising has always had an uneasy relationship with research. The fear is that research makes ideas smaller — it rewards the safe option and turns bold, creative work into something everyone can agree on (and in turn, something no one feels much about at all).

This isn’t entirely unfair. Bad research can flatten creativity. It can over-rationalise instinctive responses and ask people to explain things they can’t really explain. It can squash the life out of an interesting idea before it’s had a chance to breathe.

But I would say that’s not an argument against insight. It’s an argument for better insight and a more strategic approach to insight delivery. Done well, consumer insight shouldn’t be the final hurdle in advertising development. It should be the springboard, the confidence-giver, and the guardrails in which creativity can play.

So why is there still tension?

From testing to strategic partnership

In recent years, the narrative around advertising research has become dominated by the word ‘testing’. There are good reasons for that: one being that testing tools have become faster, more accessible and actually better. We can take a 30 second TV ad, then measure emotional response, attention, branding, distinctive assets, recall and likely effectiveness with ease and pretty cheaply.

Marketers, for the most part, see testing as part of the process. This is progress, for sure, but I believe there’s also a risk.

The trouble is that when insight is reduced to testing, we belittle its impact and that of the people delivering the insight. Don’t get me wrong, testing can deliver some fantastically useful information. But I’d like to put out a rallying cry for our industry to get in there earlier and help shape the thinking in the first place. For me, the bigger opportunity is for insight managers and agencies to act as strategic partners much earlier in the process. Not simply asking whether an ad works, but helping define what ‘working’ needs to mean. In other words, helping businesses drive growth, not just mark their creative scorecard.

Good insight keeps the work brave and on brief

Advertising is difficult because it has to satisfy so many demands at once. It has to:

• Carry the brand
• Please the business (and the CEO)
• Make sense to the staff and culture
• Work across channels
• Survive stakeholder opinion
• Distinctively encode the brand
• Be interesting enough to earn attention
• Ideally, sell something (haha, remember that?!)

Phew, no wonder ideas get compromised along the way! But if insight managers and agencies are doing their job, they can hold the work up against the job it was meant to do in the first place. Not in a rigid, joyless way. More like a strategic compass, or as I heard at our recent conference on this topic, “Good insight provides the confidence to allow creativity to flourish” 

The future role of insight in advertising

The best insight people don’t kill creativity, they give creativity something sharper to work with. They help teams really understand people, and they bring culture, category and context into the room. They challenge assumptions without crushing ideas, and they make sure the work isn’t just liked in research but is capable of building the memories and associations brands need. It’s definitely more than testing alone!