The name of the game has changed

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‘Consumer insight’ is dead. Long live ‘data investment management’. At least, that’s the case within WPP, where a new name for the marketing services group’s insight division was ushered in during August.

The name-change was made with very little fanfare – mentioned in passing halfway through CEO Martin Sorrell’s first LinkedIn blog post. The post itself caused quite a stir, but mostly for the fact that Sorrell had finally joined a social network.

However, it was the name change that intrigued us. So we put it to Sorrell: What was the rationale for rebranding the consumer insight division as data investment management?

“It’s very deliberate,” Sorrell said, in a telephone interview. “A lot of people talk about data, but they don’t know what they are talking about. A lot of people talk about big data, and they don’t know what they are talking about. But we have a real data business [within WPP] and I want to focus more attention on it.”

So far, so sensible. Just as research agencies became insight agencies when clients started using the ‘I’ word more, it makes sense that with ‘data’ being a hot topic, Sorrell would want to make clear that the insight agencies WPP owns – Millward Brown, The Futures Company and TNS, among others – are in the ‘data’ business too.

Managing the insight ‘fund’
It’s the ‘investment management’ part of the name that’s most curious, however. WPP has another division with a similar title: media investment management – the media planning and buying arm. The message that Sorrell is sending here is that these two divisions are not that far apart in purpose and function.

“I do think [what we do in data investment management] is very similar to what we do in media planning and buying, in the sense that we manage a fund for clients – in this case an insight fund – and we have to make sure that we maximise the return on it,” says Sorrell.

That sounds more like a vision for how insight should be managed than the reality of how it currently is. A vast amount of research is still bought on an ad hoc, project-by- project, basis. Research agencies are only rarely put in charge of entire accounts in the way that media agencies typically are.

However, that’s not the only parallel that Sorrell draws between WPP’s data and media companies. Thanks to the rise of the internet, marketing services, in all its forms, has become a data-driven business – and nowhere is that more true than in media planning and buying.

“People look at the art of our business, rather than the science of our business,” says Sorrell, “but our business is both art and science: the Mad Men and the maths men. This is just another example of bringing the two together.

“Calling [the consumer insight division] data investment management really signifies that we are building a media and data investment management business. It demonstrates that we will become more and more effective at linking the data that we get to the media planning and buying that we do.

“Clients buy a lot of data,” adds Sorrell. “They develop a lot of data. They own a lot of data. They get it from many sources. But they very rarely integrate it, either in the data sphere or across other functions. We’re trying to do that job for them.”