More Than Data

Data can inform beautiful creative ideas not just invasive targeting

More than Data is a mini documentary which features me talking about data that we worked on with a lovely agency and production company in South Africa:

“Businesses love numbers and humans are messy. If you can convert human messiness into numbers you make it easier for businesses to understand them, makes decisions about them and try to sell them things.”

For better and worse.

“Simply applying the data without thinking about the human impact of what you’re doing is getting it wrong.” [Faris Yakob]

This is how we’ve mostly been getting it wrong so far, using data for ever more intrusive surveillance capitalism, tracking and targeting. 

Using data to personalize, A-B test and scale polarized political advertising into dark social posts, playing conflicting messages to different groups.

But the creative opportunities are far richer and less troubling. 

It’s the fusion of human insight and ideas and data that provides the interesting opportunities to create things that stir emotions.

Early experiments like We Feel Fine by Jonathon Harris, Flight Patterns by Aaron Koblin and We’re All Fans for The Grammys showed how you could create something dynamic, insightful and beautiful from aggregated data. Everything in the world is making data which should be informing and inspiring, not just annoying or even worrying.

The top Cannes Data Winners highlight a few different ways of leveraging data into creative ideas.

1. INNOVATIVE SAVINGS — JET.COM

Online retailers like Jet [and especially of course, Amazon] have access to a staggering amount of data, derived from an aggregated view and correlation analysis of sales and social signals.

They used data to demonstrate the lengths Jet goes to save customers money: they created an online advertisement for bowls, which they sell, which were super, and ran it during the SuperBowl, without buying any SuperBowl sponsor media. The spot tags “super” “bowl” “commercial” meant it came up as one of the most watched ads during the SuperBowl. They built a social media analysis tool to calculate the amount you should spend on any of your Facebook friends for Christmas based on your interaction metrics. And so on. It would be have been nice to see it integrated back into the company’s actual data, but it’s still way more fun that re-targeting.

2. HUNGERITHM — SNICKERS

The Snickers Hungerithm is an algorithm that monitors online mood in the manner of We Feel Fine, by frequency analysis of negative terms on social platforms. As the levels of anger go up, the price of Snickers at 7–11 goes down, accessed through a reduced price bar code on your mobile phone.

A tightly integrated and highly commercial idea, ideal for both the brand and age of outrage.

3. AiMEN — CANAL+

The promise of digital media has always been touted as laser targeted scale, reaching the right person at the right time with the right perfectly tailored message — one vision of perfect planning. In most cases, this direct response model turns advertising into direct marketing, collapsing a socio-cultural stimulus into a direct sales exhortation.

This idea made use of IBM’s Watson to perform natural language processing on social posts that expressed sins and targeted a relevant response to them from the Bible.

Pulling from an existing corpus many people already like and extending a compelling content experience into social is a step removed from hashtag spamming and selling 0.0003% more shoes per person through A-B testing, but if creative executions are going to scale in a way that delights, this is a generative and directional indication of how.

ENTER YOUR CREATIVE USES OF DATA INTO THE NEW@LIA AWARDS CREATIVE USE OF DATA CATEGORY.

We've partnered with the LIAs to create the NEW@LIA AWARDS to reflect and champion new kinds of ideas.

THERE ARE A SUITE OF NEW@LIA AWARDS CATEGORIES:

Native Advertising, Influencer Advertising, Media Creativity, Creative Data, Self-Promotion, Creative Tech, Product Innovation, Media Innovation, Experiential,Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.