Evolving insights
Editor’s note: Jack Miles is a director at Shape Insight in London, with 17 years of experience in quantitative research, behavioral science and insight communication. His work has won awards for insight innovation, business impact and B2B research. Find Miles on LinkedIn.
World Advertising Research Center (WARC), a global intelligence service for the marketing and advertising industry, recently unpacked (registration required) the trends behind creative effectiveness. trends behind creative effectiveness.
Naturally, much of this focuses on what the latest creatives and strategists need to do. But these recommendations also have implications for insight. More specifically, where does insight need to innovate to better shape effective creative work?
Shaping creative for human and artificial audiences
Understanding the audience is at the heart of insight. But now we have to help brands succeed with a new type of audience. An artificial one.
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of structuring digital content so that AI-powered search engines and chatbots can find and cite it. The challenge is that research by INSEAD, Jellyfish and WARC (registration required) found that human and artificial audiences are very different: There was zero correlation between how humans and LLMs judged 480 winners of the Creative Effectiveness Lions Award, which honors campaigns that demonstrate tangible, long-term results in advertising.
The question is now how do we evolve our segmentation and target customer approaches to stay valuable in the GEO era?
Get better at identifying and building distinctive brand assets
The same research by INSEAD, Jellyfish and WARC found that two things drove creative impact across both human and LLM audiences: distinctive brand assets (DBAs) and category entry points (CEPs).
DBAs (the sensory cues – colors, shapes, taglines or sounds – that let people recognize your brand without the name) also have a unique accolade. They are one of the five marketing truths (registration required) that marketing experts and professors Byron Sharp and Mark Ritson agree on.
The problem for insights is that, at best, an insights team will know how to create and interpret research in Jenni Romaniuk’s, professor and international director at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, DBA grid. But it’s an area where there’s been little research innovation.
Whether that means creating new distinctive assets or understanding subtler ones like color and sound, this is a gap we should close – given how important DBAs are for both human and artificial audiences.
Bring brand and product research together
Typically, insight work focuses on either brand or product – rarely both at once, and often for good reason. A combined brand/product scope can be impractical, and the two may sit on separate budgets.
However, Coinbase CMO Catherine Ferdon is quoted as saying:
“Brand is product, product is brand and the two are working in service of each other and kind of can’t stand alone.”
This makes sense. For many years, insight teams have tracked brand and advertising performance together. So why not track brand and product together?
Similarly, 2023 research by Kantar called for brand and customer experience (CX) to be managed more closely – something AB InBev’s Marcel Marcondes (registration required) called for marketers to improve.
Help marketers close the promise and reality gap
Brand is a promise. The customer experience is the reality. The two have to align for a brand to succeed.
If your promise is great but your reality doesn’t match it, you’ll attract customers but fail to keep them. If your promise is poor but your reality is fantastic, the few customers you have will love you – there just won’t be many of them.
How can insights help solve this problem?
Firstly, by thinking about CX beyond NPS. CX is about friction, delivering on promises, effective touchpoints and the extent to which a brand does the job people buy it for.
Secondly, each of these areas needs to be linked to brand metrics. How does friction impact brand image? How does touchpoint visibility link to DBAs?
Go micro: Understand the nanosecond of surprise
Insight has long been used to understand moments. Moments in the consumer journey. Moments that matter. Moments of truth. But the moment we should focus on next may be the moment of surprise.
According to research found in System1’s e-book, “The Creative Dividend,” the most surprising ads deliver 4.5x more fame effects vs. the dullest ones – outperforming even happy ads on that measure. Understanding whether ads deliver surprise – and how they can – is valuable for marketers.”
However, a moment of surprise lasts roughly 1/125th of a second. That’s far smaller than the moments Insight teams are used to working with.