Insight – buried alive?

Nick Johnson’s article ‘Insight is dead’ has clearly hit a raw nerve or two in the industry. In the spirit of these times of coalition I’m happy to acknowledge some truths in his critique: yes, insight has become a cliché. Yes, entire rainforests have been defoliated in the cause of hunting down suitable definitions. And yes, it’s often misused.

But I have to disagree with his post-mortem. As with so many of the fin de siècle pronouncements of death that we’ve heard in recent years (science, advertising, history) the death of insight is a misdiagnosis.

As an ex-ad agency planner who’d sell his own copy of Predictably Irrational for a good business-winning insight, I know the value of insight and I understand that usability is all. And as someone who spends much of his time now training research and ad agency folk, not to mention clients, about how to recognise and unearth insights, I have a vested interest.

Without getting tripped up in the semantic undergrowth, my first issue with Nick’s argument has to do with definitions. He is giving the word ‘insight’ too many meanings and choosing which ones to attack. He mistakes trees for the forest, data and information for insight and accuses the industry of wasting its time on something that has “zero intrinsic value”.

For me, insight remains the prime currency of our business. Information (or data) is fuel for the engine of what I call ‘insightment’. The reason I use that term is to emphasise that insight should be seen as a process, a way of working and thinking rather than merely an object that can be picked up and counted. And let’s not forget that it is rare to find someone who would admit that more information is better (just ask Oedipus).

Science and scientists have long understood this. Albert Szent-Gyorgi, Nobel laureate biochemist, said “discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different”. There is an inherent element of creativity and subversion here. ‘Insightment’ depends on the ability to perceive new and unexpected connections – information is to be collected, insight is to be connected. Nick makes no mention of some of the key elements of insight – surprise, simplicity and emotion, the link to creativity and the essential ‘aha-ness’ of it.

The second element I want to discuss is implementation. Nick highlights the importance of communication and the role of the debrief. I agree with much of his argument, but it is a savage indictment of our industry that we are still having to argue about how to deliver findings to enable the greatest commercial benefit.

He talks of “taking the business to a higher level” as if this is something extraneous to insight. But that is the very point of it. Any planner or client who sees the enormous business advantage gained from the insights behind Orange, Pot Noodle, Sainsbury’s or Marmite appreciates that insight is about the end not the means.

There is a small but significant straw man I want to attack too: the “purity of research”. We all now know (don’t we?) that we are in the business of constructing meaning, not delivering a ‘truth’. Clients, as a sub-species of humans, are what I term ‘semavores’ – devourers of meaning. As such, let’s banish the traditional ‘broadcast’ model of the debrief in favour of something that trades in meaning, not ‘truth’ (let alone objectivity or fact).

This is why I preach the metaphor and practice of storytelling to reframe how we present, in order to access the human emotions that allow us to tell tales and thereby create conversations. We should stop mistaking catalogues for explanations, and think of the debrief as a dramatic event with an audience rather than a one-way, fossilised lecture.

Then there is the issue, raised by one of the commenters on Nick’s piece, of the difference between a research manager and an insight manager. The short answer is about £20K, but more seriously this goes to the heart of the insight question, and will be familiar to those of us who endured the researcher-planner wars of the 80s. Planners have always instinctively understood the need to make research actionable.

Diffusing the insight through the client culture, making it stick and demonstrating its financial worth is essential in these days of high accountability. Researchers are having to adapt to this reality so that they can collectively advance on two fronts at the same time: the spectrum of creativity, in order that they can be primed to alight upon insights that dig deeper and explain more; and the commercial ladder, so that their insights can be considered commercially viable.

So it seems to me that Nick’s conclusion – “Insight is dead – long live diffusion” – is based on a false dichotomy. Both live on. By all means let’s bury some of that data and the traditional ‘broadcast’ debrief. But if he believes that means insight’s dead, I fear he has buried the wrong body.

Anthony ‘Tas’ Tasgal is a former ad agency planner who has spent the last 10 years running POV, a brand, communications and training consultancy. He is also a course director for the CIM and a lecturer at Bucks New University