Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking at the ‘Noisy Thinking’ conference, a regular jam-session for strategic planners, organized by London-based APG (Account Planning Group). If you don’t know what APG is, you can stop reading this because it will be neither of interest nor of use to you…
The premise of the conference is simple: pick a controversial topic, invite leading experts on it with different points of view, give them only 10 minutes to present, distribute baseball bats – and enjoy the carnage! Hence the ‘noisy’ in the title.
This time they miscalculated a bit. All of us on the podium shared the same thoughts, only each for different reasons. The theme was as big as it gets: will Big Data and algorithms replace strategy (and, in the subtext, creativity). In other words: in the world of learning machines and artificial intelligence, which is beginning to resemble the natural world, and with the infinite universe of data and signals that we all leave behind in digital and real space, will the role of a strategist become redundant?
If machines / systems know who the consumer is, where they are (both in the media and in the physical sense), what consumes their media time, what they are watching at a given moment, what their previous history of behaviour is and their consumer habits by category, in other words, their universal consumer profile – then who needs a strategist?
The question is relevant because it now no longer only concerns the search, but also the branding. It concerns a variety of creative formats – content and ads – which are now planned in the same way that used to be the case only with the search. If we know who the people are, and what they need, if the delivery of creative content takes place in digital space, why wouldn’t the strategy of access to them also be automated?
That’s at least how the argument goes for many who – for reasons of personal promotion or the need to sell something – pull a white sheet over themselves and jump out of corners, scaring the industry with a loud “Boo!” Your final hour is at hand as well – say they – arrogant and inflated metrosexual quasi-intellectuals who look with disdain on all of us with our statistical brains!
The culmination of this attitude came at the last year’s Cannes Lions, where one of the editors of the magazine ‘Contagious‘ spat it out right in the face of the world’s creative elite – and was not challenged to a duel. Palpable anxiety was in the air in that room. The scent of a dangerous truth hanging in the air…
Well, not quite, if you ask me.
I – and my team – eat data for breakfast. Of course, we are at Google – the universe of data. Nevertheless, we remain convinced that algorithms based on an abundance of data will not replace either strategists or creatives, for quite some time. Or more precisely, not all of them…
I want to put into perspective the extent to which I am expected to be on the side of the ‘algorithmists’. Last year, in 2015, Google had 11.9 trillion (thousands of billion) searches and signals in its system. If each of the signals was a star, that would be 119 Milky Ways. In only one year!
In one hour, about 250 million videos are watched on YouTube globally. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. The options for targeting are endless…
Why then do my team and I still believe that this abundance of data will not replace strategists or creatives?
Because people are not only what they are, they are also what they want to be – or what they don’t know they are. Because the extremely limited reservoirs of our attention can be attracted not only by the things we need, but also – and especially – those that are interesting to us. Because the analytic capabilities of even the smartest systems are currently only at the level of so-called ‘weak artificial intelligence’, and because the emergence of ‘strong AI’ will take at least another 20-50 years.
Algorithms are great for ‘harvesting’ intentions at the end of the purchase cycle, when the consumer is in the market with the clear intention of buying something, or is searching for specific content – when this need is already known and defined. But they are not very good for defining territories, approaches and ideas that are new, unusual and – therefore – interesting. For the construction of ‘mental availability’ (in the phrase of Prof. Byron Sharpe, ‘the new Kotler’, who is one of Kotler’s biggest opponents) at the beginning of the cycle, where the battle is waged not only through defined intention, but also through creating favourable associations between the brand and specific feelings or moods.
Algorithms aren’t creative. They don’t work with emotions. They don’t reside in the territory of ‘Hey, did you see that…!?’ as in a recent demonstration of the new strategy for Persil, where American prisoners pity modern children because they spend less time outdoors than they do! A new version of ‘Dirt is good’. As someone recently said at another APG meeting, no algorithm in the world would propose a gorilla playing drums in an ad for chocolate.
Algorithms do not create a ‘buzz’. Or at least not yet. They have a lot of light, but no warmth – which is the mission of my team and me at Google: to get immersed in this abundant ‘light’ of data and then, as living human Transformers, to convert this information into emotional human insights that will be the beginnings of exciting creative territories…
That’s why strategists and creatives can still sleep in peace. At least some. Because there are two things they have to worry about, from the perspective of the abundance of data and automation.
First, there is no longer just one strategy. By some estimates, 40-60% of total advertising is boring, functional and non-creative ads based on different actions or functional messages. A very small percentage of advertising is of the kind seen in Cannes.
Those and such messages can and should be automated. They don’t need a strategist, only a junior creative team and an algorithmic media plan. Such projects are an insult to the serious strategists and creatives. Farewell preacher – no one will be sorry if robots take over that function.
However, if your agency usually sits in that space, if it has positioned itself as a sausage factory which industrially spits out clichéd messages, you have a reason to fear – at least in developed markets. Create added value for your customers ASAP!
Another thing to ponder about is this: Marketing today is too big for one person alone, even for a single agency. Because of the very abundance of data and information on consumers, as well as the number of potential marketing channels and new technologies, it is necessary to change the process in the agencies.
The old way of forming a strategy, which I call the ‘wet towel approach’, would be that the strategist goes to his ivory tower, gets immersed in consumer research, struggles for days and weeks with a wet towel on his aching head, and finally emerges with a halo of light around him and announces his vision to his creative team: the proposition and the fabled brief!
This segmented, linear process no longer functions properly. It’s because both the strategy and creativity have become too much for just one man. This has led us to introduce a group approach to the creation of ideas both in our teams and in the ZOO.
First, when we get the client’s brief, we immediately do a session of ‘decanting’. As with wine, a brief needs to mature, and we do it in a session in which all the members of the project team are present: strategist, creative, creative technologist, project coordinator and project manager.
Very quickly, in half an hour, through discussion, many new angles and territories are discovered, new directions and manifestations of strategy, research and ideas…
The second step is that the strategy and the ideas are continuously shared, during their formation. As soon as any one of us finds something interesting or has an interesting idea, it is shared. This principle is called ‘fishfooding’ and ‘dogfooding’ and is taken from the software engineers. You don’t wait for some kind of ideal finishing strategy or idea to be formed; the process is much more agile and collaborative. A number of brains are involved, the associative map of ideas and approaches is wider, the thinking is deeper, wider, more interesting. We feed each other’s creativity…
Obsolete, inflexible processes and business models are much more threatening to the agencies, at least those on the creative side, than algorithms. At least while artificial intelligence doesn’t exceed that critical mass or begin to beat us not only in chess and go, but also in painting, cinema and music.
But, when that happens, marketing will be the least of our problems.