WARC Future of Strategy 2024: Synthetic data – speedy saviour or another example of the industry’s arrogance?
An article written for WARC
I was recently asked by WARC to contribute some thoughts on synthetic data to this year’s ‘Future of Strategy’ report.
You can read the article, the report, and other excellent articles from others here.
I’ve also copied my article below. Enjoy.
We’re trying to sell products and services to people yet we’re choosing to be further away from them than ever, argues Mark Hadfield, Founder of Meet the 85%.
Understanding the people that matter
David Ogilvy famously stated “the customer is not a moron. She’s your wife.”
While we might turn a blind eye to the gender bias (and potential misogyny) inherent in this comment, the underlying point Ogilvy was making remains: the people we seek to understand for our work are all around us and we should treat them with respect. As marketers, we should be obsessed with understanding their behaviours, motivations, and desires.
Another industry legend – Mary Wells Lawrence – stated: “You have to meet every kind of person and endlessly stretch what you know.”
Over the years this appetite for understanding people close up has eroded. We’ve seen our focus shift away from the (sometimes complex) reality of people’s lives to simplified, aspirational consumer profiles.
And as the industry has sped up, so too have the sources that deliver ‘insight’ agencies so desperately need. ‘Insight’ they need to differentiate their offering and keep people in jobs.
Where even focus groups can be deemed too expensive or too slow (to do ‘properly’ at least), quick surveys, desperate Google searches for trends reports and social listening are utilised to try and uncover the holy grail, with ever-decreasing levels of success.
In this race for speedy ‘insight’, we’ve drifted further from real people.
Persuasion is the goal
At its heart, the advertising and marketing industry is about one thing: persuasion. Whether it’s a TV ad or a TikTok influencer collaboration, the ultimate aim is to persuade people. This could mean persuading someone to try a new product, spark a purchase, or form a memory structure.
Today’s marketers aren’t just competing for attention with other brands, they’re up against the red pill of reality: mortgage rates, inflation, divisive politics and divided communities.
The blue pill of distraction adds to this busyness: relentless streams of content, social media algorithms and the clamour for a quick dopamine hit.
Whilst the challenges of attention and persuasion have increased, so too have the pressures from above.
The era of the unreasonable shareholder
Back when I was a Planner, I worked through the era of ‘Uber’s Children’ – that of the unreasonable consumer who demanded something better, quicker AND cheaper.
Shareholders and agency leaders demand unreasonable returns too. The mantra of ‘faster, cheaper, better’ echoes around agencies as their race for growth is detrimental to staffers' mental health, work-life balance and agency churn rates.
Yet, forever thus in the industry: the wheat is separated from the chaff with the majority of agencies racing to the bottom delivering whatever their under-pressure clients demand. Need social? We can do that! Need a gaming expert? That’s us! Need us to restructure our teams? Just tell us how! Need 30% off the rate card? Of course!
But there remains a minority of agencies striving for difference – those who still prioritise creativity, strategy, and longer-term effectiveness, who embrace new approaches and technologies but are not blinded by snake-oil products that promise quicker, better and cheaper outputs.
Which brings us to synthetic data
Enter synthetic data – the next new thing that’ll change the industry! (Remember others from the recent past? Facebook ‘Likes’? Second Life? NFTs? The Metaverse?)
Whilst it varies, the Synthetic Data I’d like to focus on promises us ‘digital twins’ or ‘intelligent mirrors’ of real people. Or, fake people, if you like.
Now, my cynical tone may be what you’d expect someone who runs his own ethnographic research consultancy to say. It may surprise you to know I do think synthetic data has a place in the future of marketing. It’s a potentially incredibly useful tool. And, like any tool, it will be best employed for specific jobs.
I can see, for example, that it’ll be useful when time is of the essence, and you want to ‘speak’ to people and get their thoughts on your hypotheses, ideas or campaigns. In that scenario, I can see how that approach may replace an ad-hoc focus group set up hastily in the agency’s boardroom.
But we’re not here purely to understand people. If the role of communications is to move people emotionally, shouldn’t we also be here to feel people? As Richard Huntington, CSO of Saatchi & Saatchi says: “You can’t feel data.”
The beauty of humans (and the beauty of ethnography) is that so often it’s not what we say that powers an ‘insight’ or a strategy, a campaign or some NPD… it’s what people don’t say. It’s the nods and winks, the gestures, the objects with meaning they have in their homes and in their lives. That texture isn’t picked up by a typical conversation – be that with synthetic data or in a focus group.
These feelings that are elicited from ethnography are the special sauce that can separate the wheat from the chaff.
Examples from my career are travelling around Indonesia and Vietnam meeting motorcycle mechanics, observing them working and gaining an in-depth understanding of their work – and lives – to understand their deep insecurities about putting food on the family table. That led to a trade platform that helped them build their skills (and push more product onto end consumers).
Or visiting factory workers on the outskirts of Bangkok to understand the volume drivers for a beer brand. By sitting with factory workers and eating with them, I understood the drinking culture, the round instigators and why they chose one brand over another.
How arrogant do we want to be?
Whilst synthetic data promises significant efficiencies, it also poses a dangerous and existential risk to the industry and wider society.
For many years I was a passionate planner, and I still care deeply about that role. The role should obsess about human understanding. Yet, now, more than ever planners are in constant ‘output mode’ – pressured into writing briefs NOW, and delivering strategies YESTERDAY – and with no time to inspire that thinking with the reality their customers are living. It’s damaging to their confidence, their outputs, their careers, the agencies their thinking represents, and ultimately the industry.
And forget the industry for a second… the less we value trying to understand the people around us, the more we lose touch with each other and deepen the divides that are ripping society apart.
As Barack Obama stated during the Democratic Convention in August: “We chase the approval of strangers on our phones. We build all manner of walls and fences around ourselves and then we wonder why we feel so alone. We don't trust each other as much because we don't take the time to know each other. And in that space between us, politicians and algorithms teach us to caricature each other, and troll each other, and fear each other.”
The advertising world has been accused of being out of touch for years. How arrogant do we want to be before we admit we’ve gone too far? We’re now planning to not even talk to real people, yet we hope they will ‘love’ the brands we thrust into their lives.
So, whilst lots of businesses are treating their customers as the morons Ogilvy mentioned, some are valiantly flying the flag to deeper understand the realities of people’s lives.
We’re one of them.