Does Big Data inspire or hinder creative thinking?

It is a testament to the richness of life, and the poverty of numbers, that all things cannot be counted.1

Cast your mind back to the end of the noughties – 2008 to be precise. Tesco, led by its invincible CEO, Terry Leahy, is in its prime. Neither Sir Terry, nor the company he led could do any wrong.  Their store locations were precise and spot on their target demographic markets, resulting in 14 years of growth in profits and sales. Tesco’s customers themselves may have thought that Lord Cohen himself read their minds by directing appropriate offers to them as if a mystic archer had anticipated their purchase need and fired a magic arrow. Hitting the bull’s eye with a carefully considered discount voucher. If there was magic, it was driven by a new alchemy – Big Data, harvested from hundreds of thousands of Tesco customers’ purchases and filtered through algorithms defined by the new boffins behind marketing analytics.

Wind the clock forward to 2014. Captain Terry Leahy has long since left the flight deck, fastened his personal parachute and jumped from the Super-Jumbo Jet we all recognised as Tesco. Successive CEOs have taken his place, pulled on every lever that came to hand, but failed to change the death dive course the Tesco Super-Jumbo was set on. In September 2014, Tesco found themselves at the centre of an accounting scandal (resulting in the more official sounding ‘Serious Fraud Office investigation’) after admitting that they had overstated profit forecasts by £263m. The current incumbent of the ever tightening CEO medallion/noose, Dave Lewis recently announced plans to close the retailer’s head office and to abandon or close nearly 100 stores. Thousands of jobs will be axed as Tesco’s reputation continues to suffer in the midst of a media frenzy. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

What had gone wrong? Had the algorithms of the marketing boffins failed? Had the arrowed offers lost their penetrating point with their targets? More importantly, had big data failed? The simple truth is that the recession and subsequent recovery stretched the market to its polar opposites, where M&S Food and Waitrose benefited from the top end and the canny Germans of Lidl and Aldi have cleaned up at the bottom end, leaving a flabby, unfocused whale of a Tesco beached on the sands in between. Take a closer look and one might conclude that the boffins put too much faith in their algorithms. Had they become too presumptuous of their market and second-guessed them too often? Ultimately, had Big Data made them stupid? Dullards that believed more in formulae than creative spark? Boffins that fell in love with models and forgot the basic needs of their target customers for good value, creative offers and a unique deal (even if the deals were common to a segment populated by 21,529 others).

The accusation still hangs in the air. In spite of all the macro-economic factors, did Big Data actually make things worse and hinder the creative process? Does it still? We’re all familiar with the successful Amazon formulaic claim “people who bought this book also liked these…” which has become as familiar to today’s marketer’s as Lord Leverhulme’s famous 19th century epithet of not knowing which half of his advertising was working. The charge is that big, cloudy computers and the Big Data that they pump around bear responsibility for the dumbing down of the creative instinct. Had the creatives not been sent to the loft-room to play quietly with their coloured pens and whacky ideas whilst the Big Data boys did the real work cooking up their campaigns in the kitchen, might things have been different? Almost certainly in my view.

1 Morten Jerven, ‘The problem with the data revolution in four Venn diagrams’, [Stable URL] http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2014/dec/17/data-revolution-limitations-in-images

Looking through the history of memorable campaigns, I really don’t think big data was necessary to come to the decision that with Marmite - you either love it or hate it. Or that big data helped the tortured creative team who got to kicking out time before one of them finally looked at his pint of Guinness and breathed the immortal word “genius”.

Overall, the cameo of Tesco and the (relative) failure of over-reliance on big data-driven campaigns is a reassuring sign of the fickleness and unpredictability of the human psyche and spirit. Just because we had goose last Christmas doesn’t mean that’s our indefinite lifestyle choice. We may have hated the experience and only done it because a visiting maiden aunt expressed it as her preference. Also, and sorry to state the bleedin’ obvious, but just because we bought a case of wine last month, doesn’t mean we will do so every month ad infinitum -  it may have been a one-off whim or for an occasional party. As every marketer should know, the value is in the life-time of the consumer and the focus on that relationship should not be solely defined by tactical purchase decisions. Recent successful retail campaigns have focused on the relationship and life-cycle of the consumer. An obvious, but compelling example is the John Lewis Christmas series which in an understated way, closely reflects the lifestyle and generational aspirations of its middle England targets. Did Big Data help drive the creative? One suspects that the storytellers were in the fore of creative campaign development rather than the data engineers.

One strong hint towards Tesco’s conclusion to the big data debate is the impending sale of its data analytics consultancy, Dunn/Humby which was announced in early January 2015. Dunn/Humby was the architect of the Tesco ClubCard business launched in the 1990’s which was eventually fully acquired by Tesco in 2010. At one level, this is a typical reaction of a cash-starved business called to retrench/refocus itself on its core business. In the context of this discussion, is it too far-fetched to suggest that it also reflects a falling from favour of the analytical approach to marketing facilitated by big data.

So what do we conclude of the impact of Big Data in the creative process – benign or constructive? Help or hindrance? As usual the truth lies in balance – by all means take reference from what the data is telling us, but don’t let it totally dictate the story or the dialogue. SatNav is a great innovation for mobility, but if we were to entirely rely on it and refer to it on every occasion we would be more likely to a) crash and b) fail to experience the journey.

As Tesco stumbles into 2015, there are other problems that plague users of Big Data. Namely a growing lack of trust as the bridge between confidential and public data becomes ever more tenuous. Information that we have shared in the public eye is being indexed and processed to provide insights into our behaviour that even we are not aware of. Increasingly, a previously relaxed public is becoming aware of these intrusions, and concerned by them. The Guardian sums it up poignantly,

We are left operating on blind, ignorant, misplaced trust; meanwhile, all around us, without our even noticing, choices are being made.2

For all its virtues, Big Data is nonetheless a parasite that feeds off of (largely) unsuspecting consumers and their decisions. As people become more aware of the ‘trade-off between security and convenience’ that we all make, perhaps convenience will begin to look less appealing. Digital security seems ever more flimsy: celebrity photos are stolen; apps such as Uber and Whisper are caught tracking the location of users. Somewhat ironically, in a survey Orange conducted amongst 2,032 adults in Europe, 82% of people find it hard to control the use of their personal data by organisations.3

2 Ben Goldacre, ‘When data gets creepy: the secrets we don’t realise we’re giving away.’ The Guardian Online, [Stable URL] <http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/05/when-data-gets-creepy-secrets-were-giving-away>3 The Bulletin, ‘Lack of consumer trust over data spells problems for the modern business’. [Stable URL] <http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/lack-of-consumer-trust-over-data-spells-problems-for-the-modern-business/>

Put simply, big data has a trust problem. Agencies must be careful to not let Big Data hinder creativity, for it is something that could be as fleeting as it is ‘Big’.4

In as much as our task as marketers is to establish and define the brand proposition with its audience, we should consider the long term of customer relationships and be wary of the whims of data trends. As one who wrote extensively on relationships, we should perhaps consider the words of the Bard himself whose sonnet 116 suggests constancy wins the day:

“Love is not loveWhich alters when it alteration finds,Or bends with the remover to remove.O no, it is an ever-fixed markThat looks on tempests and is never shaken;It is the star to every wand'ring bark,Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken."

Ultimately, the question of whether Big Data inspires or hinders creative thinking depends largely on how you interpret the future of marketing. Those in favour of the analytical approach see big data as a necessary and valuable weapon for the future of marketing, particularly as the brand battles are increasingly being played out on the web where analytics is king. For those of us responsible for the definition of brands and their messages through creative thinking and the telling of a wider brand story, history suggests that big data can be a useful influencer and informer of thinking. However, to make it the be-all and end-all of the brand’s lure and message is a strategic error that dulls the creative edge and risks alienating the consumer from the relationship we are trying to build.

4 http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/05/when-data-gets-creepy-secrets-were-giving-away