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 ...