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Friday, October 20, 2006

Trust me, I'm an ad researcher

Had a fun little encounter last Thursday with a friend of a friend. Met up late after I'd finished groups. Anyway, it turns out this guy directs ads for a living - and next thing I knew this aggressive short bloke stands too close to me asking me what I do (had a feeling he knew already), telling me that he thought advertising research was crap and that being 'a creative' he didn't 'agree with' asking a bunch of unqualified people about their views on unfinished ideas cos they just couldn't possibly imagine what they might turn out when fully realised blabla. As one may imagine, this was just what I needed after having spent 3 hours trying to hold constructive discussions with consumers on a piece of advertising…I was a bit too knackered to ask him whether his theory of mind allowed for other people's imagination at all or whether he thought only he had a birthright on ideas. No, to my shame I actually defended our work - he didn't deserve it and also didn't want to know. But at least he did made me think - about the ingratitude of (luckily only SOME!) ad people and of how the work of the qual ad researchers after all these years still seems to be misunderstood - not just by random bar encounters but also by some clients and even agency folk, less so planners obviously but creatives and some account people …It's frustratingly and tediously obvious to us but apparently still needs re-iterating…we don't take consumers' word as read and it is our task to try and assess potential against the objectives agencies/clients have set for their advertising. In our work we need to be able to make a call when people in groups are being bloody minded and literal and when on the other hand there seem to be fundamental problems with an idea. We work hard at trying to understand whether problems are 'just' executional (which by the way does not mean the same as unimportant, another little hobby horse of mine…), to do with the creative idea or with the whole strategy. This means of course that we do need to deploy our imagination - as well as encourage consumers to use theirs - to extrapolate what may/may not be possible. We try our best to facture in 'real life' factors, for example media context - though admittedly we can't forsee everything. In Geoff's immortal words our attitude throughout is that of 'paediatricians, not morticians' - trying our very best to give other people's babies a chance in life. (Honestly, good ad researchers don't enjoy picking ideas apart - we'd much, much rather try to help making the most of good stuff.) And finally, we're comparing responses to ads to a rather large database in our heads - of thousands of people's reactions to previous ideas, finished ads, ideas which were then turned into finished film... Come to think of it, we are rather qualified… There's a couple of problems though - . One - let's face it, we are often talking potentialities so there is a chance we may be wrong about some ideas which may turn out rather better - or indeed worse - than we predicted. Still though, I'd maintain that consumer response can help us to make quite a good assessment of underlying potential of an IDEA and we try not to be crass nor too definite when making executional recommendations. Secondly, we remain outsiders to the proccess so there can be resistance to taking in what we've got to say. We do our best work with agencies who trust us - and respect our intelligence, insight into people, our appreciation of advertising. At best they even concede that we may have some imagination…

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