The Ambition Gap

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We’ve all been asked to do something innovative and daring by our clients or stakeholders only to see our plans drastically diluted. Or watched carefully thought-out proposals, using cool new methodologies, lose out to something basic. 

The problem is the gap between our ambition to do something different and the reality of how research is used. We need to remember that our industry exists to help businesses make more informed decisions. The easier it is to apply research to the process of making those decisions, the more useful it is. It’s much simpler for the end user to understand and include a simple number in their presentations because that’s what they are familiar with. 

We need to help the end users of our research to become more familiar with different methodologies if we want them to trust us to be more experimental. Here are two ways we try to do this at Twitter: 

1. Don’t brief agencies only on the problem you need to solve, but for how the results need to be communicated. 

We will typically have less than 10 minutes to debrief a project and it’s not uncommon for the most complex projects to be reduced to a single insight on one slide. We actively encourage that. If the core insight from a project isn’t simple enough to be summarised on one slide, then it’s not clear enough. 

So when we brief agencies on a new project we tell them this is going to happen and ask them for three reports: the single-slide insight; the 10-minute debrief; and the full ‘research’ debrief. 

By focusing on summarising projects on a single slide, we try to make it easier for our stakeholders to apply our research. 

It doesn’t matter whether it was a survey, an online discussion group or a neuroscience experiment, they know they are consistently going to see a simple insight from our projects that they can understand and use immediately. That has helped them become familiar with newer or unconventional methodologies, which means they trust us to experiment more. 

2. Plan for speedboats and battleships 

In 2002, the US ran a war game against a fictitious enemy. They deployed their slow but powerful battleships, expecting to meet a similar force, but instead were overwhelmed by countless smaller boats that were vastly more agile and unpredictable. It was a spectacular defeat, but we think about this a lot. At the beginning of each year, we set out our plans and look at the balance between faster, tactical projects and big, strategic – but slower – projects. 

We aim for a constant flow of smaller, simpler projects delivering regularly throughout the year, and we rely on traditional methodologies for these. That means our stakeholders are being provided with a feed of research that’s easy to interpret and they get to see their most difficult problems being solved with more innovative methodologies. 

These two approaches to planning and briefing have given us the space to innovate, while keeping our stakeholders happy and excited to work with us. 

Give it a try when you set out your next plan, or brief your next agency. And agencies, push your clients to be clear about how research is actually being communicated and used internally, not just on what the problem is that they are trying to solve. Tweet me @mdtaylor and let me know how you get on; we’d love to hear about your experiences. 

Matt Taylor is head of research, Europe, for Twitter