We’re a week post officially launching our agency, with all the anticipation, excitement and nerves that come with it. Somehow it’s my turn again to try and distill a decade of industry insight into an easily consumed bitesize lump of content fit for your inboxes.
Short of ideas, and seeing as I just mentioned it, I’ve settled on insight.
“Insights are like sausages, it’s better not to watch them being made”
I’ve sat in review meetings with clients, and heard people tell porkies. Now it's a natural instinct to focus on the positives, especially when it's been a bad sales month, however here is where we see the difference emerging between legacy Creative Directors, and the modern performance creative strategist.
I’ll caveat here that there is always a place for novel artistic direction, especially on large brand campaigns. I’m focussing on the world of growth utilising platforms like Meta to reach and engage your audience, where creative is the new targeting, and the role of creative strategist has genuinely shifted.
If we have to look in the mirror as an industry, we must be honest and accept that a lot of strategy has been taste driven. An individual with strong creative opinions and aesthetic preferences makes up their mind, then retrospectively justifies it with cherry picked insight.
This approach no longer holds water, and we must hold each other accountable for surfacing intelligent insight at speed, and using this as the basis for how we talk to our audience online.
“That’s literally SO insightful”
Insight was meant to be the underpinning game changer, taking us from the madmen halcyon days to that of the data-driven modern era of digital marketing.
Insights as a term is utterly endemic to digital marketing. It’s claimed to underpin every media plan and creative campaign that has launched for the last 25 years, and there has always been a noticeable pressure put upon creative strategists and directors to prove their worth.
Firstly, I think it’s as grossly overused as the word “literally”, and therefore has had its meaning ruthlessly diminished.
In marketing, an insight is meant to be a deep, often non-obvious understanding of customer behaviour, motivation, or tension that reveals why people do what they do. It’s something that can be acted on to drive a brand or commercial outcome if an agency can be bothered.
A genuine insight usually has three components:
An observation — a behaviour, attitude, or pattern (what people do or say)
A motivation — the underlying human truth or tension behind it (why they do it)
An implication — a creative or strategic opportunity for the brand
The classic test is the "well, duh" vs "huh, interesting" distinction. "People want healthy food" is an observation. "People want to feel healthy but don't want to feel like they're trying too hard, because effort signals you're not naturally that kind of person" is closer to an insight, it reveals a tension a brand can solve.
It’s rarely insightful, who cares how much CTR went up or that my CPM fluctuated 0.002% day on day. The job was 90% manual lifting, 10% thinking. Honestly on some days I was probably 1% thinking.
At the time however that was how it worked. The big network agencies were in their prime with delightfully siloed process, lots of manual work and little joined-up thinking.
“Is the insight in the room with us?”
A few things insights are not, which often get confused in briefs:
Data point — "62% of women aged 25-34 buy moisturiser monthly" is a fact, not an insight
Observation — "Gen Z spends a lot of time on TikTok" is descriptive, not revealing
Feature/benefit — "Our product lasts longer" is a proposition, not an insight
Good insights tend to feel slightly uncomfortable or counterintuitive — they expose a contradiction between what people say and what they do, or surface a need people hadn't articulated. Dove's "Real Beauty" came from the insight that only 2% of women described themselves as beautiful, despite the beauty industry telling them they should. That tension unlocked a decade of work.
In agency life the term gets used loosely (sometimes lazily for any interesting fact), but the discipline of separating observation from insight is what separates a strategist from someone summarising a research deck.
Now bringing it back to the present, in a world of misinformation, fake news, and more insidiously, AI generated ideas, how can the modern performance creative strategist prove their value?
Our proprietary AI platform, Antenna, is built to do just this. We like to think of it as the ultimate tool for any good strategist. We’ve combined the world of art and science through Antenna, mapping the internet aggregating all the conversation surrounding your brand world. Using this, we uncover the nooks of opportunity beyond the obvious and surface these insights into actionable recommendations. The goal being to directly impact the way brands build messaging, test angles and hooks, and provide reasoning of where your customers live online.
The best strategists now understand that the process can be accelerated, with the world of social media and trends living and dying in a day, adaptability is the name of the game, and Antenna gives you just that.
“Source: Vibes”
My advice to any brand spending significant amounts of media spend would be to tear into your insights that fuel any rationale on a media plan.
Think about the following questions, and make sure there’s genuine interrogation.
Walk me through the path from raw data to this specific recommendation - More importantly, show me the data and inputs you didn’t use.
What Good Looks Like: a clear audit trail from source data, through the analysis layer, to the conclusion drawn — with visibility on what was weighted, what was discarded, and why. Force transparency.
How would this insight be different if it were generated today versus six months ago, and how will I know when it stops being true?
What Good Looks Like: the agency can point to the live data feeding the insight, has a clear view on which signals would invalidate it, and has a mechanism to flag those shifts before they show up in performance.
So that's your bitesize lump of insight on insights. If your agency can't show you where an insight came from, what it's built on, and what it would take for it to stop being true, you're not being planned for, you're being sold to. Demand the audit trail, demand the live data, demand to see the working. Insight should equal transparency. Anything less is just vibes in a nicer wrapper.
The creative strategist isn't dead, but they will have to evolve by embracing the tech changes happening. Lean into the tools the market is giving you and remember, no idea is above scrutiny.
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