Bring back the love: No, Piyush Pandey, research in advertising isn't 'stupid'
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This post stems from an excerpt Piyush Pandey'sPandemoniumpublished onLiveMint.com, where he emphasises why advertising research has something he hasn't ever paid much heed to. Read the original article here.
The pilot episode of award-winning American drama series Mad Men makes a point that was recently reiterated by one of the most celebrated patriarchs of Indian advertising, Piyush Pandey, in his tell-all memoir, Pandeymonium. The point: most advertising research is stupid. Much as the way Don Draper condescends a professional psychologist by shucking what looks to be her unimaginatively dull research report, into a bin, Pandey shucks the gamut of advertising research performed by MR firms and ad agencies alike – in the proverbial bin. Stupid techniques, stupid objectives, stupid inferences and even stupider ideas – his exasperation with the exercise of performing advertising research is matched only by his visible disdain for its interference with the creative process.
But just as the episode in question opened with a laidback Draper scribbling on a paper napkin in his smoky watering hole of the day, making the most of some alone downtime, one where he interviews the waiter assigned to him about his cigarette of choice, brand preferences and usage history if you will, Mr. Pandey goes on to tell us about all the travels and experiments with culture he has immersed himself in, the ‘real’ questions he has wondered about, the observations he has made, and the stellar body of work his endeavours have resulted in. Unlike Don Draper, whose interaction with the waiter seems more non-committal in fetching a breakthrough, Mr. Pandey draws some clear parallels between his inquiries and their role in disruptive creative thought. For Draper, it isn’t until the penultimate moment, impending embarrassment with the client staring in his face, that he pulls out “Lucky Strikes - It’s toasted” out of his short brimmed fedora and saves the day. It’s then that we first witness the glory that is ‘Draper in element’ – something we would go on to root for, for the next 7 seasons, right until the last moment. It’s what we root for in real life too. As advertising people, our memory is marked by creative breakthroughs, everything in between being noise.
And that’s the point I want to draw your attention to, isn’t this tension where creative genius is ultimately realized? At the identification of a gem amongst stones, the flagging of a signal amidst noise, the spotting of merit where it deserves and what have you. An advertising fallacy inherited from the Mad Men era, is that great creative is a by-product of individual genius. That it is a mystical occurrence only a few gifted minds encounter, a Eureka moment, an orgasm, a romance, a UFO – you know it when you see it, there you have it, there it’s gone. Understandably, this myth lends itself to the art of it all, and to a fair extent – the excellence that sets some of it apart from the rest. But it does not explain the business we are in. The business where you must show up to work every day armed with several creative solutions to several apparently uninspiring problems. Unfortunately, one swallow does not a summer make.
To say most research is stupid is to perpetrate a dangerous belief that, left to their own devices, all creatives know better. Or that one makes the other redundant. Dangerous because for every flash of creative brilliance born of honest passion and dedication, there are thousands in creative industries (account management and planning included), who are smug in their insulated worlds, who confuse their own recreational media consumption with real-world investigation, who pick up consumer behaviour cues from the last film they caught on torrent, or the last trending post, rather than having a finger on the behaviour the next film should tap into or the next uniting internet movement, if there is to be one at all.
Mr. Pandey’s explorations are bona fide research techniques that many of us think we’re too smart for, even as innovative research continues to give birth to disruptive work on a global scale. From VLOGs, social experiments, co-created content, crowdsourcing, virtual environments, real-time consumer immersions to digital ethnography, disruptive brands have pre-empted creativity in their research methods to fall in step with evolution of consumers. So the question really is, where do we plan to stand in this landscape? Research is just a word, like advertising. We outlive these words faster than we learn what to do with them. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We are a generation of ad professionals fortunate to have seen the amazing yet intimidating transition from advertising to brand entertainment. From big scalable ideas to small, sharp, gritty ideas. From brand powered civic movements, corporate-led governance to a people-powered sharing economy. From old to the new to the future and other utopias we can’t even keep track of. We are the generation that now stands facing perhaps the most daunting of expectations, that brands actually solve real problems in real lives, extend real payoff, provide real services – because if they don’t someone else will. The monopoly of internet-led service providers and aggregators on our attention and loyalty are testimony to this expectation. The danger of scoffing at ‘research’ is ultimately that we don’t operate in a research vs. creativity world anymore, we operate in a relevant vs. irrelevant world. And guess which side most of us are flirting with.
Are we tuned into our clients’ problems enough to wonder about them over drinks? Most of us aren’t even aware if there is a problem. Problems of consumers are an even further cry from our consideration. On a good day most agency reps quote Henry Ford on the futility of asking consumers what they want and hold up vague audiences as people who would “totally buy” what they are saying. On a bad day, we send a done-to-death idea into execution and count our stars that the client was as bad at homework as we were.
Ironically enough, the kind of rigour, investigation and immersion Mr. Pandey brings into focus, has never had any replacement in this business. Research is not the enemy of great creative, lack of creativity is the enemy of great creative. And it shouldn’t have to be the creative department alone who shoulders the burden for fishing out these gems. As planners and servicing, we tend to forget that often and become efficient middle-men of mediocrity instead. Relevant research is what we must be demanding foremost and rejecting everything that falls short. In the Mad Men world, the same fatigue-inducing research report that was thrown in the bin, gets fished out by an eager Pete Campbell who’d rather go to a meeting with “an” idea rather than no idea at all. When Draper reprimands him, it’s with an air of responsibility as a veteran (that his personal dismissal from earlier couldn’t care to accommodate) – “if that research was any good, I would have used it”.
And that is the ultimate value that an experienced point of view brings to any process that aims to create value to the business, research included. The solution to mediocrity lies in many things, an absence of research is not one of them. A surge in better research though, could definitely lift some smokescreens that have surrounded our comfort zones. Moreover, the act of creation might be a gift, but the task of delivering a great creative product is service. And given the increasingly disappointing state of our trade, we all need to get much, much better at providing it. In a post-2008 economy, where marketing budgets don’t prioritize optimal media plans, let alone optimal research, it might mean we need to take a few extra leaps on our own time and merit, and make some enquiries that the “systems set in place” don’t leave room to ask. It means now more than ever, there is no excuse for not tuning in to real people in the real world with real conflicts. It means we need to be illuminating researchers first, our designations later. It also means it’s not just answers we need to be fishing for. When our vocation stands at the brink of irrelevance, we better be on the hunt for stories, for opportunities, for possibilities and for discoveries that push the envelope on our own evolution or we may as well resign ourselves to another Mad Men realization “I keep going to a lot of places and ending up somewhere I’ve already been”. For warning us of this and reminding us to be better equipped I thank Piyush Pandey. Here’s rooting for creativity and research and anything else we can use, as tools to deliver a larger picture of relevance.
