The Odd Couple

42 Insight | the bIg Issue

the odd couplecreativity – a right-brain type of sorcery that magically manifests from instinct, genius, the preconscious mind. Research – a left- brain, mathsy, powerpoint graph compiled from focus group data. It’s hardly surprising that these disparate entities –still flung together in the advertising process despite the evolution of new media and methods – make strange, often tetchy, bedfellows. Yet, as Laura Swinton discovers, they’re kind of destined to stay together…

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research | Insight 43

the odd couple



Scientia potential est – knowledge is power. It’s a mantra that’s been around since at least the 17th century, allegedly coined by the philosopher Sir Francis Bacon, and these days it’s a truism we take for granted. A cliché it may be, but one with resonance – particularly in adland, particularly now.

Turbulence in the global economy coupled with technological and cultural revolutions accelerating at a pace that threatens to make luddites of even the most switched-on hipster-nerds if they let go for even a nano-second have broadened the scope of the industry so that it extends far beyond what Don Draper would understand as ‘advertising’. And yet the key to thriving in this uncertain landscape is the same as it’s always been – know something your rival doesn’t. However the form that this knowledge should take is decidedly less straightforward. It all depends on who you speak to. For some it’s that spark of creative insight that springs from an alchemical blend of experience, instinct and genius. For others it’s the reassurance that comes from a hypothesis confirmed by approving focus groups and agreeable-looking figures lined up on an Excel spreadsheet. Ordinarily in agencies, it’s the job of research to provide that second form of knowledge while creatives work their own magic quite separately.

Traditionally the relationship between creativity and research has been tense to say the least. The push back from creatives is understandable and often justified. For one thing there’s a tendency to use focus groups and interviews in a way that assumes that they are some kind of idea-generator that trumps anything a creative can come up with. Henry Ford’s shrewd observation “if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” springs to mind. When that’s combined with an anal attention to detail in the interpretation of findings that ignores the ideas and the bigger picture, it’s unsurprising that people working on the creative side of things at the conceptual and execution stages of a project find themselves rather wound up by the experience.

“If I ask a crowd would they rather let me save Barabus or Jesus you might just end up with disaster,” muses Dedé Laurentino, executive creative director at TBWA\London, who criticises the use of research to micro-manage creativity. “What most creatives react to is that stereotyped situation that we’ve all experienced. You’ll get one lady in a focus group who says ‘I like it in pink’, and people take every little detail like that and obsess over it.”

The misery of mid-project testingThe key to relieving this potential tension lies in communication. “When you tell creatives what to do they have a normal reaction like any human being which is ‘go fuck off’. The problem with research is that it stands on this ground of authority and tells people what to do,” says David Terry, director of strategic planning at Wieden + Kennedy Portland.

Research dictatorship has no place at the agency – and according to Terry’s colleague Andy Lindblade, also a strategic planner, it’s the responsibility of planning departments and research teams to present findings in a way which is accessible and inspiring. “We want to use research that can ignite the creative journey. We’ve all seen reams and reams of PowerPoint presentations that may well have useful insights but which are dull. For us it’s about finding what’s interesting and presenting it in a form that can inspire creatives.”

Most off-putting is the use of testing in the middle of a project, particularly when the tools used can offer only an insipid, incomplete version of a final product. As agencies’ remits become ever more diverse,

encompassing live experiences, digital innovation and even product design, the old systems and methods developed in the days when all an agency had to produce was a press campaign are fast becoming irrelevant and inappropriate.

Mo Saha is the creative planning director at indie agency pd3. Before joining pd3, she worked at Leo Burnett where she cut her teeth on old-school methods and found that much of the research carried out revolved around pre-testing campaigns. But live experience accounts for around half of pd3’s business and they very rarely try out ideas with consumers – for Saha it just doesn’t work. “You can’t describe an experience. It relies on surprise and delight, on being in the moment, stumbling across something and thinking ‘I’ll tell my friends’. You can’t pre-test experiences. You end up using half-finished concepts and boards, and really the only function of that is to check comprehension if there’s confusion about the language,” she says. “It’s like describing a joke or a magic trick.”

Advertising research’s quiet metamorphosisHowever not everyone agrees that pre-testing can be completely dispensed with. Nigel Hollis is the chief global analyst at Millward Brown, an international research agency owned by WPP, and having seen the data he knows exactly the damage that badly-researched or under-researched campaigns can have. “Unfortunately, while the practice of research has evolved I am not sure that its role has changed all that much. Rather than a tool intended to help people envisage how things might be, research is all too often used as a safety net to avoid risk. And in today’s fast paced world, research is all too often sidelined in the drive to get a piece of copy on air,” he argues. “The assumption is that it is better to run something than nothing. It is a really dangerous assumption because there is a lot of evidence, particularly from the digital domain, that finds that ads can actually have a negative effect on brand perceptions.”

There’s a delicate balance to be struck. For W+K’s Terry the problem with research is that so often it’s an exercise in ass-covering, which seeks only to confirm what we already know. “There’s a lot of obviousness or small mindedness that comes out of research. It might be true but it’s not that useful or differentiating or ‘OMG’ amazing. It’s not the sort of thing that makes creative people go ‘I know what I can do with that’. The last conversation I want to have with Dan Wieden after spending $100,000 is one where he says ‘you need research to tell you that?’”, he explains. “John Hegarty said that if every piece of advertising has been tested and approved then it will be likeable. This is a powerful industry with powerful norms. What research can do is avoid disaster. But it can’t make something great.”

If research is suffering from a smallness of vision, then it begs the question: why? TBWA\London’s Laurentino reckons it comes from a very human fear of the unknown. “I appreciate accumulated knowledge – it’s great because it will teach you what has happened in the past. But it can’t

“You’ll get one lady in a focus group who says ‘I like it in pink’, and people take every little detail like that and obsess over it.”

“the last conversation I want to have with dan Wieden after spending $100,000 is one where he says ‘you need research to tell you that?’.”


research | Insight 45

“Good research is about questioning what the output should be. When I first got that brief from o2 I never thought that it would lead me to conversations with tV producers in Bollywood!”

“We are O2’s music sponsorship agency [the mobile phone network sponsors venues around the UK], but we did a campaign for their general business. They had a really cheap tariff for calls abroad that was much less expensive than their competitors. For some reason the TV ad they had run didn’t really deliver much traction, so they called us. We looked at the data and one of the things that caught our eye was that calls to India were quite low on O2 compared to other networks.

This led us to think about the Indian community in Britain, and to ask what would generate conversations between India and the UK. Domestic soaps are really popular in India and thanks to satellite TV channels we have the same shows here. So we created Indian Soapstar. Pavitra Rishta is a soap that has 500 million viewers across the world and we held

a competition where you could audition for a walk-on part. We found a girl in Slough and flew her over to Mumbai. There was loads of press interest in India and in Britain.

The end result was that call volume to India from the UK on the O2 network increased 900 per cent. Compared with the millions spent on a TV campaign, Indian Soapstar only cost something like £400,000.

Talk about international calling! But it wasn’t an obvious way to go, and we only found it because of the research. Good research is about questioning what the output should be. When I first got that brief from O2 I never thought that it would lead me to conversations with TV producers in Bollywood!

Mo Saha, director of creative planning at agency pd3, explains how a surprising nugget of research and some old-fashioned imagination triggered a campaign of Bollywood proportions on an indie-sized budget

Calling Mumbai (repeatedly)

tell you what will happen in the future. Human beings would love to know what’s going to happen but the best tool for that is anxiety – anxiety will tell you a million possibilities,” he reflects.

This lack of confidence and a fear of being truly pioneering though doesn’t just hamper great creativity. It hampers great research. Ironically, research as it is traditionally deployed, borrows from the scientific approach. Regardless of how flimsy or unscientifically sound that research might be, it engages in hypothesis testing and seeks to confirm even that which may seem self-evident. And that’s a great approach. For academics. For that hive mind, chip-chip-chipping away in labs to contribute a small piece of evidence to a gradually evolving, shared body of understanding. But this is advertising. It isn’t about collaboration, it’s about competition.

“You cannot outperform the market by adhering to conventions,” agrees Laurentino. “If you’re doing research just to see what everyone else is doing, use it to do something differently.”

Indeed, in keeping with the spirit of hyper-evolution that’s unfurling in the creative side of advertising, research has been undergoing a quiet

mutation of its own, expanding its gene pool to draw from disciplines outside of adland’s primordial soup.

Design is one such domain that offers a potentially fruitful approach. When it comes to designing any product, from furniture to online interfaces, the creative approach has to balance originality with functionality. The role of research in design – and its position within the process – reflects this.

Gavin Wye is a UX (user experience) designer with a background in graphic design at digital agency TH_NK, whose projects include the new Pottermore website [an interactive Harry Potter fansite]. His experiences have led him to believe that the segregation of creatives from strategy or research in the traditional set-up is based on something of a false distinction that undermines the integral role that research can play in creativity. “Research is not just an add-on or a precursor to a project, it has to live through a project ,” he explains. For Wye, research is vital from the very beginnings of a project, it can help refine and define the problems a client faces. “User experience design is quite science-based and I don’t think big agencies have a thorough understanding of it. Most have a

The O2 campaign, Indian Soapstar, devised by agency pd3, inspired by research data



user experience team but the team may sit away from the creatives.”

The particular research tools and methods may vary from client to client, but as far as Wye can see, there is nothing that beats getting out of the office and talking to people in the real world. Where focus groups and surveys place people in a false environment where they may be unforthcoming or less than 100 per cent honest, watching them tussle with a product or problem in context can be illuminating.

Wye recalls that working on one

“I appreciate accumulated knowledge – it’s great because it will teach you what has happened in the past. But it can’t tell you what will happen… the best tool for that is anxiety – anxiety will tell you a million possibilities.”

“Provided you ask the right questions there is no reason that an ad like Cadbury’s Gorilla should not perform well in research. That said, people can easily tell you if they enjoyed an ad, whether it made them feel uncomfortable or if it did not fit their expectations of the brand. The bigger challenge is to understand from their responses whether or not the impression left by the ad will be linked to the brand in people’s minds at a later date. After all, that is what we need advertising to do. We need it to leave a lasting impression that is intrinsically linked to the brand.

Rachel Barrie, strategy director at Fallon, Cadbury’s creative agency, has been quoted elsewhere as saying that Millward Brown’s link test found the ad extremely engaging, impactful and well branded. Importantly she states, “The thing that (Gorilla) failed on was its ‘persuasion test’ but Millward Brown said we should still run the ad.” And that is an important point, not all ads

have to perform equally well on all metrics. It is pretty unlikely that an ad is going to change someone’s mind about whether they want to buy a brand as well-known and well-liked as Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. The advertising task is about making the brand more salient and vital, rekindling positive feelings about the brand.

I think good research can serve as both stimulus and sounding board. Creativity can be sparked by all sorts of things, including research. It might be a throwaway line from a respondent in a focus group that stimulates a new idea. It might be findings from a research project designed to explore consumers’ behavior and feelings about a product category. But what research really offers is a means to use the target audience as a sounding board. It is a chance to get feedback on how people react to ideas and executions either before they run or afterwards.

‘How on earth did Gorilla pass testing?’ According to Nigel Hollis, chief global analyst at Millward Brown, which carried out the research, the answer isn’t as bananas as you might think…

Gorilla in the (research) mist

Psychology and neuroscience also have much to offer, both as a means of understanding human behaviour and also teasing apart peoples reactions to new products or campaigns (as explored in shots 130). Laurentino reflects on his experiences collaborating with Brain Juicer, an international research team whose psychology-driven talks at the agency really got the creative team excited. “They helped us a lot. They’re smart guys who are trying to digest what’s going on. Creativity is not exclusive to creatives – everyone should engage with it, from teachers to marketers to scientists. When we find creativity in research it’s like water in the desert.”

company’s website led him to spend time in their call centre, where he went out of his way to pick the brains of the more disgruntled members of the workforce. “If I’m talking to younger members of the team, I say do what feels naughty. That’s when you’re really starting to answer the difficult questions,” he muses. “Skulking around in call centres, talking to the people the manager tells you not to, being inventive. Creativity and rule-breaking is not the preserve of one department.”

And if there’s something of the relentless newspaper hack about Wye’s approach, then that’s because journalism is another discipline that can offer advertising a fresh perspective on research. Lindblade reveals that at Wieden + Kennedy, too, this idea of a curious reporter digging away to get to the root of a story is particularly useful when it comes to working on global brands. “Sometimes, for example, we need to understand an issue that a brand has globally. The planner and researcher will go round the world, walk the streets, meet interesting people and take in the smells and sounds and visceral experiences. We might engage photojournalists and talk to experts in the field to get to the bottom of what people are thinking.”

In keeping with the hyper-evolution that’s unfurling in the creative side of advertising, research has been undergoing a quiet mutation…

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The Odd Couple