In all of this heady whirl of reinvention, please let’s not forget we’re just salespeople. Whatever we may be in other parts of our lives or in our dreams. In this job, we’re not poets or art house cinematographers. We’re not dilettante flaneurs. We’re hired to sell things for our clients. Using creativity and strategic intelligence to deliver a competitive edge. Because business is really hard, and the struggle is real.

But how can we do that if we can’t look the audience in the eye? How can we do that if we don’t really know them? It sometimes feels like we’ve become a little bit too Oxbridge and not enough Ordsall. I mean, until we drag this shabby business through the D&I revolution that it so badly needs, by and large we’re all comfortable middle-class with a heavy geographical skew to the home counties, right? There’s a simple one-word answer to this y’know. Research. Don’t reach for the mouse at this point. Bear with me on this.

Somehow that simple one-word answer has become a profanity in creative agencies; ‘It destroys ideas’, ‘All famous work bombs in research’, ‘It’s a proxy for the client’s creative judgement’, ‘Housewives in Pinner don’t understand advertising’, ‘But the Creative Director says it’s a Lion’ ‘Millward-Brown eh? Tsk! (rolls eyes)’. If you’ve worked in an agency you’ve heard them all before. There is a pervasive and bewildering arrogance. You would be dragged outside and soundly beaten if you suggested hard wiring research into the creative process. Security would be called if you welcomed ‘ordinary people’ into the ‘creative department’.

Catching consumer opinion

But hang on. I would argue that’s a good thing. Especially if we asked them what they thought about the work as it was being created. In real time. Because not only is that opinion damn important. It’s also hugely volatile and prone to violent fluctuations. It’s almost impossible right now to predict what’s happening to consumer attitudes and behaviour; COVID, lockdowns, elections, vaccines, Brexit, QAnon, brands taking a stand. We’ve been researching the market since The Rona arrived and opinion is moving so fast it’s almost impossible to catch it. Almost.

So, we do actually hard wire research in our creative. Don’t hate us. And we do course-correct creative in real time in line with real people’s opinions. Does it kill it? Does it lose the magic? Does it heck as like. We let numbers lead the work, not egos and you know what? That makes it stronger. Two rounds of ‘on the fly’ qual and quant embedded in the creative process means over the last 12 months we’ve had average Purchase Intent scores of 80%+. Yes, you read that right. We learned a whole load of other stuff along the way; millennials need a moment at breakfast; natural is better when backed by science; the fewer ingredients the better, it’s better to predict than to react; box ticking healthy is better than working hard for it; everyone is looking for comfort (obvs), and one brand had the platform it was looking for under its nose all along. Saved a fortune.

The military have a word for the times we are living in: VUCA, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Doesn’t make it any easier for any of us. But understanding what real people care about, in real time, is going to get you a better reaction when you start knocking on those doors. As Arthur Miller said in the massively overquoted Death of a Salesman ‘Never a fair fight with a stranger, boy. You’ll never get out of the jungle that way’.