Why we need to stop making stuff up and start awarding science and creativity in marketing
Adam Ferrier reflects on why we need another awards show and how the newly launched MSiX Awards will champion better marketing.
I didn’t do very well at science at school, and to be honest I failed statistics the first time at university. On a really bad day I’ll even admit that science doesn’t interest me nearly as much as pure free form creativity. However, I’m still bamboozled by how unscientific our industry is and how much stuff we just ‘make up’. Further, with the amount of money at play this seems somewhat irresponsible.
I can still remember joining a market research agency after some years practicing as a psychologist. I couldn’t believe how ‘made up’ it all was, and how little science was embraced in both qualitative and quantitative agencies. I then went to a creative agency and they made the research agency look like the Smithsonian by comparison. However, it was (admittedly 10 years ago) seeing how media plans were created that really blew me away. They were fictitious garbled nonsense with little (no) scientific underpinnings as to how agencies were recommending clients spend millions of their dollars.
Now to some extent things have changed. I recently took a brief from a client and the entire brief was framed in the marketing science principles developed by the Ehrenberg Bass Institute. It was refreshing and challenging, and I believe a canary in the coalmine for where our industry is heading.
As budgets get tighter, and the need to become more accountable for what we do, and why we do it increases, science and the scientific method will play a greater role in marketing communications (and in fact, it already is).
However, at the same time I believe the most powerful weapon in any marketer’s arsenal remains creative thinking. Science and creativity are not mutually exclusive – they complement each other. Done right, they reinforce each other.
I want our industry to embrace the marketing sciences because it will likely lead to better marketing, less wastage, more confidence and most definitely better ideas.
This is the reason we’ve developed the MSiX Australian Marketing Science Awards. We want to champion and document the best of marketing sciences in Australia. We would love it if Australia embraced these awards, and put forwards their best attempts at embracing marketing science in their practices. The awards are open to clients, agencies of all types (research, creative, media digital, PR and so on), consultants and universities. At a maximum of 1000 words, they won’t be too arduous to write, but will be judged carefully. We have some of Australia’s (and the world’s) best thinkers as judges of the awards, with their identities to be revealed shortly.
So please enter for a chance to win an MSIX award, and have your paper published in our journal.
As a final word, I’d like to make a pre-emptive defence to some of the comments that will no doubt appear below. Here we go.
Just what we need another awards show? I agree it’s unfortunate how cluttered the awards space is. A friend of mine sends me, as a joke, every email he receives encouraging him to enter awards. It’s been going for two years now and he’s becoming very annoying (he’s the CEO of a large media agency). However, there are no awards encouraging people to get involved in the marketing sciences. Further, we are hoping to document and publish all winning entries so we can disseminate best in class examples of marketing science in action.
Adam, who are you to champion science in marketing? This one I agree with! The loudest voice is rarely the smartest or most knowledgeable. It’s another reason to run the awards – we want to out the people who are best at bringing science into marketing.
Awards are just a way to make money! Our awards are really cheap to enter (around $265). This is not going to make anyone wealthy. We just hope we don’t run them at a loss, and that they are strongly supported.
What about the Effies? The Effies are the pinnacle for proving effective marketing in Australia (and around the world). However, just because something is effective it doesn’t mean it’s repeatable, or even generalisable. The Effies do not encourage a scientific method or approach. In other markets there are awards encouraging science and behavioural economics (such as The Nudgies in the UK) that sit aside their IPA counterparts. We believe the Effies and the MSIX Awards will both champion better marketing – albeit in a different way.
Adam don’t you have a day job you should be doing? Yes. I better go do it!
Adam Ferrier is curator of the MSIX conference, global CSO of Cummins & Partners, author of The Advertising Effect: How to change behaviour, and keen to see marketing embrace science as much as it does creativity.
Nice idea so best wishes. But I’ve had a very unscientific experience of the Ehrenberg Bass system where the user of would pull out cards from a box and get you to choose 3 and order them – worse, this method supposedly led to things called Fascinators, that epitomised the brand in action and led to one of 149 (or so) different personalities.. It was more ad hoc than scientific IMHO
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Why is the industry so engrossed in congratulating itself about how clever it is?
What other industry has this many awards for just for doing the job their client is paying them to do?….sell stuff? Is the industry just full of insecure egomaniacs that it has to continually pat itself on the back to feel like it is doing something worthwhile?
We just sell stuff. That’s all we do. Park the egos and just get on with it!
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Ever heard of it?
When you first come in contact with an idea and you are surprised by it, seduced by it, want to spend time with it?
This comes from originality.
Reducing this to a repeatable science is what in my opinion too many marketers are already doing. Bombarding them into submission.
If everyone does it, then it will work even less.
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Science is falsifiable and therefore requires an operational definition and theory.
I think we all know that true Art and creative is unable to be defined this way. Some things certainly are and should be measured, however the scientific principles fall short in the fuzzy liquidity of human processes.
Adam, as a Psychologist you would appreciate the thoughts from Neuroscientists on defining consciousness, human meaning and storytelling. This may never be defined by science and is the place where much Art and Creativity is formed.
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Adam,
Admire your efforts for greater understanding of the role of science in marcoms. You’re making a valuable contribution to a much needed debate.
But why the need for an award? You’ve now turned ‘it’ into a competition and by doing so your efforts are in danger of being devalued by serious marketers. They don’t care about awards they care about learning.
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No wonder you failed statistics.. Science and Marketing do not mix because all of these ‘analytics’ that marketers love to talk about requires that you meet statistical assumptions. I wonder how many of these data analytics companies does proper screening of their data…..
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Borlat – don’t get me started.
The number of decisions I’ve seen being made because of statistically insignificant research is astounding.
As much as I love Maths and Stats, knowing it has simply made me jaded, particularly when you see so many “successful” people incorrectly using “stats’ when they have NFI what they are talking about.
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Adam
Good to see you’re still active and agitating in this important space. If this initiative helps to move the discussion on from the science itself (backward looking) to its application (forward looking) and impact in a confusing and competitive world, then it’s helpful.
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@carl perfectly said.
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Nice article Adam.
Of course there is a counter point of view and that is for certain agencies and people to stop claiming what they do is science and get back to developing genuinely creative ideas that help business be more effective and influential.
That comment is not a dig at you, but the countless agencies and people I meet who seem to believe that by reading a copy of New Scientist, suddenly qualifies them to act like they’re Einstein 2.0.
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Adam, you state in your post that creative and science compliment each other – and are not mutually exclusive.
Your post does not say why another reward like this is needed – except to stop making stuff up. What stuff? Can you define that? You said you like free creativity but think the industry needs to embrace science.
I’m not clear on what the problem is that the rewards and conversation are addressing.
I will make a comment to try and advance this conversation as Carl suggested;
Here is a definition from Dictionary online
“the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc. originality, progressiveness, or imagination”
How would you measure this?
Bringing science into online media and advertising means you can measure the variables within a marketing campaign and it’s performance, however that performance would measure all variables including how the campaign was executed, the audience segmentations, the technology platforms and capabilities, quality of data, just to name a few.
On a more detailed level, you can measure engagement with the creative in a number of ways, and if you can prove the specific target audience segment were the ones who saw it ‘engaged with it or not’ it might be one measure of relevancy within the creative. But still, was what the audience saw creative or not?
It seems clear a fundamental problem lies with measuring the interacting variables of media campaigns, which includes the process of measuring a creative component – if the campaign used first party data and even 2nd party, then your measurement of audience segmentation will be more accurate and perhaps engagement is higher if relevancy elements are met, BUT if you are using frequently used 3rd party predictive data, that alone is going to be subjective in terms of the target audience the creative was ‘created’ for.
Why? because if you use data which has made predictions about people’s behavior (that has little evidence of accuracy in the first place), how can you measure creative performance? Behavioral science states measures on behavior that has occurred but to predict how behavior will occur in future runs into many fuzzy and unreliable pathways.
If creative and science are not mutually exclusive as you said, then how can they be combined in a reliable measurement? And can you just use the human processes that need to occur when a person has been creative?
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I like the initiative Adam. But if the award space is so cluttered as you say, why make it an award? Why not fully embrace the practice of the scientific community and produce a peer reviewed journal for the Marcoms industry. Only dishing out a Gold, Silver and Bronze award may make achieving scientific marketing excellence seem rare and unattainable whereas if you could demonstrate a large volume of examples of scientific marketing perhaps you could shift industry norms.
I’m just spit balling, but like I said, I like any initiative that endeavors to increase the use of science in our industry. And if we’re as self absorbed, egotistical and award obsessed as everyone says we are then maybe an award is the right way to go.
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@cyber. lol. I don’t think Marketing data will give you a statistically significant result using p=.05. Marketing science don’t use ‘null’ hypothesis, because it will expose marketing in a negative light. Hence, I question how they can call it marketing ‘science’ when they don’t use basic statistical principles.. They should call it Marketing Pseudo-science, because that is what it resembles..
I guess marketers will do and say anything to sell themselves….but ..hey that’s the marketing industry…
I wonder how long this marketing analytics industry will last until people wake up and realise it does not work (hello woollies)
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um… http://researchmanagement.org.au/awards.html
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Don’t split the atom Adam – it won’t end well for anyone..
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