WHAT MAKES A GREAT AD?

What makes a great ad? Ensuring the creative idea drives the attention, tells the brand story, communicates the main benefit and sticks in the consumer’s mind is a start. Here are some important questions to ask:

1. Does it demand your ATTENTION?  Does this take a creative risk to earn the attention of consumers within the cluttered media world?  Is there something creatively different from what consumers expect, does it entertain, take advantage of the media, and is it shareable for consumers to influence others?
2.  Does it create a strong BRAND LINK?  Does this ad connect your brand closer to the climax of the ad’s story? Is the execution through the eyes of your consumer? Does it resonate with vulnerable consumer insights, make your brand central to the story, and then solve the problem?
3.  Does the ad communicate the PRIMARY PRODUCT BENEFIT? Does the ad focus on the one benefit that moves consumers? Does it creatively amplify the benefit, tell the story behind your brand purpose, use extreme demonstrations or powerful visuals? Note:  Focus on the benefit, not a feature. Whenever you focus on a feature, you leave it up to the consumer to determine the functional or emotional benefit. In a cluttered media world, lazy consumers move on before figuring it out.  
4. Is there something within the ad that is STICKY (and memorable) enough to move consumers? Does it engage emotionally and will it build a deeper love with those who already love you? Do you love what the ad has the potential to do? Does the ad match the brief? Will you be proud of this ad as your legacy?
5.  Does the ad deliver the brand idea? Does it leverage your creative assets? Does the ad fit with the tone of the brand? Does it use functional or emotional benefits to distinguish the brand and own a competitive space that is motivating to consumers?
6. Does the ad match up to the objective of the brief?  Will it drive the desired consumer response? Will it have an expected market impact and brand performance?
   Does the ad build a bond with the consumer? Does the ad speak directly to the consumer target? Does it leverage consumer insights to connect? Will it deepen our bond with our consumers? Can the ad help build memories and rituals? 
   
   
   CREATIVE ADVERTISING CHECKLIST
   
   
   

THE QUEST FOR THE NEXT BIG IDEA

What a BIG IDEA is not?  It’s not a TV script. It’s not a key visual. It’s not an iPhone app. It’s not a QR code. It’s not a Facebook app. It’s not a tactic. A Big Idea is a thought that keeps giving. A Big Idea is a world you can occupy and keep drawing on.

The new model of marketing is to do stuff for people and then tell everyone else about it with advertising (solutions, not propositions). Advertising used to tell you how brands could solve your problems. Now it needs to solve problems and tell you about it because everyone knows how most products work.

One example of this way of thinking is Domino’s ‘Turnaround’ campaign. The campaign starts with real customers expressing why they don’t like Domino’s pizza. This leads to a new pizza recipe and an advertising campaign centred on finding the original research attendees and taking them the new recipe for their honest response. While obviously a staged experiment, it is a dramatisation of a reverse polarity approach.

This spread to the packaging, where pizza proverbs from customers were inscribed on the boxes and the menus, which incorporated pictures submitted by customers, rather than staged food shots. The critical thing is for brands to listen to what people are saying and then incorporate what they say, and solutions and surprises to delight them, into content and behaviour.

It raises the question, how do we create value? How do we understand participants and passives, actions and channels? How do we inspire brand behaviour, not just brand utterances? We must remember that all aspects of brand behaviour are communicative, and human communication is always about relationships, and less about message transmission than we believe.

The types of ‘meta-communication’ most successful in building relationships are reciprocal (solving problems for people) or imitative (creating behaviours that can be copied). The kinds of ideas that earn attention in an infinite media space are likely to require an understanding of participation – users rather than audiences – and context.

Remember, people are not merely customers or prospects because customers are not the same as people. Customers are to people as waves are to water. ‘Customers’ are a repeating pattern of behaviour that expresses itself in people. Successful ideas create customers by modifying behaviour. Conscious or subconscious attention, therefore, needs to be aggregated at scale to change enough behaviour to create significant commercial impact. Ideas spread or die in the attention market.

So, do things for people – solve a brand problem by solving consumer problems. Introduce intermediate behaviours for imitation. Create content that people find valuable, give them tools they can use. Leverage advertising creation and distribution to help disseminate – ‘ideas that can be advertised’, not just advertising ideas.

THE SCIENCE OF BRAND ENGAGEMENT

A brand, from the point of view of a person, may be considered like a memory: every brand experience builds to develop a specific and evolving pattern in a person’s mind called a ‘brandgram’ (also called a somatic marker.)

This ‘brandgram’ is triggered by encountering additional brand cues, and these cues combine to create a new experience. This final experience at point of purchase, when the cue of the product itself combines with the brandgram, will ultimately drive a purchase decision.

Procter & Gamble, for example, calls this the ‘first moment of truth’: the three to seven seconds when you first see a product on the shelf in the supermarket. This instant is one of its most important marketing opportunities as it is at this moment that the totality of all previous brand interactions either pay off or don’t.

So, the nature of the experience is what needs to be considered – what does the consumer require when making this purchase decision? Consumers need different brands to do different things. The vast majority of purchases do not adhere to a purchase funnel at all – they are made impulsively.

When confronted by innumerable choices while shopping at the supermarket, we use brands as heuristics to shortcut decisions. Heuristics are a problem-solving method that uses shortcuts to produce good-enough solutions given a limited time frame or deadline.

Since there is, or there is perceived to be, functional parity among the primary competitors, we need to have only a very slight preference for a brand to aid the decision. Other purchases may have different contextual needs that brands help to fulfil. High involvement purchases, such as consumer electronics and cars, have a longer purchase cycle, although there are indications that it is decreasing thanks to better access to information.

There are always a combination of rational and emotional needs that brands satisfy. Engaging communication that helps to build stronger brand affiliations, a more developed sense of the brand, can help to provide the consumer reassurance, both pre and post-purchase. The needs of consumers and the drivers of their behaviour are variables. Ultimately, by looking at some of the veiled aspects of attention and cognition, we can begin to better understand people and brands, and how they interact.

LUBRICANTS OF REASON

It’s not emotion or reason, but always both. We like to think of ourselves as rational beings, but without the heuristics of emotion to help us, we would never be able to decide anything. So, it is not that there are emotional and rational sides pulling us in different directions, but that emotions are the ‘lubricants of reason’ – we can’t think without them.

Real-life decision making usually involves assessment, by cognitive and emotional processes, of the incentive value of the various actions available in particular situations. However, often, situations require decisions between many complex and conflicting alternatives, with a high degree of uncertainty and ambiguity. In such situations, cognitive processes may become overloaded and be unable to provide an informed option. In these cases (and others), somatic markers can aid the decision process.

This suggests that the role of communication could be simply establishing or reinforcing the somatic markers in association with brands so that when consumers encounter the decision of which toothpaste to buy, the somatic marker’s kick in and lubricate the decision. Savvy brands take away the consumers need to choose by covertly biasing cognition, thus making consumers lives easier.

To succeed in marketing, we need to:

• Win prospects’ attention (point A)
• Help prospects create a memory and form an intention
• Get them to act on their intention when decision time comes (at point B).

(Or, Pain Point > Solution > Call To Action)

Note:  It’s hard enough to win buyers’ attention with content at Point A. However, it’s much harder to get buyers to remember your content when they make a decision at Point B.

Great marketing helps buyers identify their own intentions or clarify new intentions at Point A. Make your messages repeatable and frequent, filled with strong emotions, short and simple, and able to easily roll off the tongue. 

NEUROSCIENCE AND RETHINKING MESSAGING

Neuroscience teaches us that memories don’t exist whole but as little bytes of sensory impulses that need reconstruction. Don’t make that reconstruction task more difficult than it needs to be. Though most marketers fear rejection, they should instead fear being ignored.

Let’s face it, most ad campaigns sink without a trace. Most brands don’t register on the radar. That’s not because an ever-fragmenting media landscape is clogged with countless messages. Nor is it because even the most basic of categories offer a proliferation of choice.

Although those factors don’t help, the reason most messaging and brands are invisible is that people filter out almost all the world around them. It’s a coping mechanism. As humans, we are hard-wired to focus on what really matters and that is highly unlikely to include a message from a brand.

Given this reality, it strikes me as odd that marketers continue to create and invest in messaging that is built on worried unrealistic foundations. 

Why, for instance, do marketers continue to treat humans as rational beings making reasonable decisions based on knowledge? Why do marketers obsess about communicating a clear proposition and engaging consumers with what they have to say? Why do marketers bother measuring how well that information is delivered, or how engaged the audience is with their message?

The answer is because it’s comforting. It creates a sense of control over what is a scary and uncertain endeavour. It feels good to get all rational about the business of developing marketing messages. But the reality is that people don’t make buying decisions the way marketers make messaging decisions.

Humans have neither the time nor the processing power to do so. Instead, the brain devises intuitive strategies to help us make instant decisions driven by unconscious emotional reactions. At best, rational processing is used to justify and make us feel good about the emotional decision we’ve already made (this is the so-called intellectual alibi effect).

The bottom line is, marketers are obsessed with information – even when psychology tells us that humans are non-consumers of information. We really should be thinking more about motive and alibi than proposition and support.

If we make decisions in an emotional and intuitive manner, then it follows that brands need to be built the same way. Brands are not explicit memory palaces, but implicit memory traces. Therefore, brands need to be built on sensory experiences and associations, not on awareness and communication.

Moreover, any strategy needs to influence the intuitive nature of decision-making, to focus on the impression we want to make rather than what we need to communicate. Basically, we should pay less attention to information and more attention to context.

Why?  Because ads work by creating or strengthening implicit associations in the brain. That means we need ideas that exist in popular culture, ideas that create a pattern in our psyche, ideas that are adopted not force-fed. When developing messaging, ask yourself the following five questions.

First, how can you disrupt? The power of creativity is in its ability to surprise people. Surprise leads to fame and fame leads to brands being chosen on autopilot. Most marketers are worrying about being rejected when they should be worrying about being ignored. You’ve got to grab people from the get-go, so use disruption to increase attentiveness and memory formation.

Second, how can you stir emotions?  Surrounding a brand with emotion amplifies its level of mental availability because the stickiest memories are formed not from facts but from emotional responses. So, what visceral reactions can you stir in people?

Third, how can you make choosing you easy? Neuroscience teaches us that memories don’t exist whole but as little bytes of sensory impulses that need reconstruction. Don’t make that reconstruction task more difficult than it needs to be. Link your brand to visual and aural stimuli and other mnemonics.

Fourth, how can you be positive? Again, neuroscience teaches us that we like to feel good, not bad. Don’t fight that. You will lose. Even with challenging subjects, make sure ensure you generate positive feelings.

Fifth, how can you reward attention? The promise of needs met is the ultimate feel-good high, so make sure any emotion you stimulate has a point. It’s not rocket science to realise that people subconsciously ask "what’s in it for me?".

Adopt this basic advice and your messaging will work better. 

A GLOSSARY OF KEY BRAND ARCHITECTURE TERMS

* Note: This list is not comprehensive.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Brand architecture is the strategy that marketers use to determine which products and services to introduce, and which brand names, logos, symbols, and other brand elements to apply to new and existing products. 

 

Brand elements, sometimes called brand identities, are those trademarkable devices that serve to identify and differentiate brands. The main ones are brand names, URLs, logos, symbols, characters, spokespeople, slogans, jingles, packages, and signage.

A brand portfolio is the set of all brands and brand lines that a particular firm offers for sale to buyers in a particular category.

A brand line consists of all products—original, as well as line and category extensions—sold under a particular brand.

A product line is a group of products within a product category that are closely related because they function similarly, are sold to the same customer groups, are marketed through the same type of outlets, or fall within given price ranges.

A brand mix (or brand assortment) is the set of all brand lines that a particular seller makes available to buyers.

A product mix (or product assortment) is the set of all product lines and items that a particular seller makes available to buyers.

A brand hierarchy is a means of graphically portraying a firm’s branding strategy by displaying the number and nature of common and distinctive brand elements across the firm’s products, revealing their explicit ordering.

A family brand, also called a master brand, range brand or umbrella brand is a brand used across multiple product categories but is not necessarily the name of the company or corporation.

A brand extension is a new product introduced under an existing brand name.

A line extension is a new product introduced under an existing brand name within an existing category for a brand (Tide Pods or Tide Total Care laundry detergent).

A category extension is a new product introduced under an existing brand name outside existing categories for a brand (Tide Dry Cleaners retail outlets).

A parent brand is an existing brand used to introduce new products.

A sub-brand is a particular form of brand extensions in which the new product carries both the parent brand name and a new individual brand name (Apple iPad, Ford Fusion, and American Express Blue card).

A modifier is a means to designate a specific item or model type or a particular version or configuration of a product (e.g., Gillette Fusion razors, Johnnie Walker Black Label whiskey, and Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum).

A flanker or “fighter” brand is a brand designed to negate the threat of a competitors’ brands so that more important and profitable brands can retain their desired positioning.

A flagship product is a product that best represents or embodies the brand to consumers. It is often the first product by which the brand gained fame, a widely accepted bestseller, or a highly admired or award-winning product.

A cash cow is a brand that is kept around despite even dwindling sales because it still manages to hold on to a sufficient number of customers and maintain its profitability with virtually no marketing support by capitalising on its reservoir of existing brand equity.

BRANDED BREAKTHROUGH - NOT ALL ADS ARE CREATED EQUAL

The best ads are enjoyable. They educate, entertaining, and inspire. They are memorable, capture our attention, and connect with the consumer on an emotional level. They make the brand central to the story.

That said, in 2018 analysis of the Adtrack database from Kantar shows that in 2018, 77% of ads failed to resonate with consumers. Incidentally, the categories which consistently had the highest recall are carbonated soft drinks, fast food (QSR) restaurants, CPG, banking, and alcoholic beverages. What’s clear is that, while capturing the consumers attention is imperative, it must result in brand recall. 

To ensure ads are optimized, focus on the following:

1.     ATTENTION

2.     BRAND LINK

3.     MESSAGE

ATTENTION

Consumers do not remember the expected. Therefore, educate, entertain and/or inspire -- but defy convention. Do something different. Take a risk. Most brand managers shy away from this path because it has higher-risk. That said, with higher-risk there is higher reward.

A timeless example of this was DDB’s (1959) Volkswagen campaign “Think Small”. At the time there was a notable trend towards larger cars in the United States and “thinking big”.  Bigger was definitely seen as better. We have previously discussed truth and authenticity as brand attributes, but this campaign is an excellent example. This campaign was in effect, the exact opposite of how cars were marketed at the time.

Speaking of entertaining, another effective technique to gain attention is to provide (someone) with amusement or enjoyment. It’s why consumers engage media in the first place. So, make your ad part of the entertainment. Incidentally, humour is not the only way to connect with consumers. A great, inspired example is Canadian Tire’s “We All Play for Canada” Olympic (CSR) campaign’s “First Skate” ad which tells the touching story of a father fashioning a sledge for his paraplegic son.

Brands need to remain ‘top of mind’ - so find ways to drive popular culture. Budweiser’s ‘Wassup’ commercial is an excellent example. Originally premiered during NBC’s Monday Night Football in December 1999, the campaign became a pop-culture catchphrase and won the Cannes Grand Prix award and was inducted into the CLIO Hall of Fame.

The ad creative also needs to be matched to the appropriate media. If you knew, for example, that 78% of all engagement with the video you created would be via mobile on Facebook, would you not optimize the video for that channel?  Alternatively, if you knew your print ad would only be extended to billboards, would you not optimize for vehicles speeding by at 80 kms per hour? Of course you would.

You should also be thinking about virality. Specifically, what makes something sharable? There is a wealth of information available of the science of making things go viral and even a great TED Talk by BuzzFeed's Publisher, Dao Nguyen. As an aside, there are a number of (largely unconscious) variables involved in what makes brands stand the test of time, which we have previously discussed at length.

BRAND LINK

The highest brand link comes from connecting your brand closer to the climax of the ad’s story. By brand we ideally mean USP or brand truth.  So, don’t just make your brand central to the story - make it the driver of the story itself. 

Another useful way to tell a compelling human-interest story is to connect with your target audience using a meaningful consumer insight or find an emotional story to demonstrate how the consumer engages your brand.

But arguably, the single most important element in telling your brand story is to amplify what sets you apart from everyone else. Call it whatever you like - USP or brand truth, consumer benefit (or insert the buzzword du jour.) The point is to identify what makes your brand unique and different and weave that into your story (with a strong visual cue.)

MESSAGE

You probably already know this, however, when brand equity is measured it is based upon what the consumer believes (not what you want them to believe.) To this end, communication is not what is said, rather it is what is heard. The best brand communication therefore occurs when you focus on the one benefit that moves consumers.  It’s about telling the story behind your brand purpose.

Ask yourself, if you could tell the consumer one thing about your product or service - what would it be?  Remember also that the more messages you put into your ad, the less likely it is that consumers recall your primary message. *Millward-Brown data demonstrates that when an ad has more than one message the consumer recall drops by 37%.

Ultimately, try to move from a functional to an emotional benefit. Why? Because triggering an emotional reaction, whether joy, sadness, humour or sympathy, should be the goal of any creative.

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How To Tell Stories Using Data And Statistics

SUMMARY

Details how to use data and statistics in story telling by providing six golden rules for success.

·      It can be argued that the central equation underpinning success in the modern knowledge economy is: analytics + storytelling = influence – since marketing is the best established of the “moving businesses”, the equation has particular resonance in marketing.

·      Data-driven storytelling fundamentally an act of empathy, it requires the narrator to imagine what it’s like to be in the shoes and mindset of the audience.

·      Six golden rules for data storytelling are: keep it simple, yet smart, find and use only relevant data, avoid false positives, beware the curse of knowledge, know your audience, and talk human.

·      Statistics can power stories and numbers drive narratives, but only if as a storyteller you are able to resist the seductive lure of data to tell the story for you.

NEED TO KNOW

·      The storytelling potential of data transcends marketing. Data-driven storytelling offers potential right across business and society.

·      Lightly peppering narratives with just a handful of well-chosen, killer statistics is the key to data-driven storytelling success.

·      Use data in messaging with caution. The more information you deploy in arguments when you’re looking to convince others and to change people’s minds, the more likely the audience is to resist.

·      If you put all available data into the mixer and look for relationships, you’ll find a connection and be tempted to conclude it’s important, when in fact it’s a false positive. Correlation is not causation, and connections in complex systems are very rarely caused by single factors.

·      Don’t fall into the trap of using all data available. Brand storytellers should start with the reason or purpose they’re looking for data in the first place, and then choose the right data.

·      Effective data-driven storytelling is fundamentally an act of empathy and human understanding. If you can use your research, data, and statistics to show you understand those you’re looking to influence, your story is much more likely to prove effective.

INTRODUCTION

The world of brands and brand marketing is full of data. Media data, customer data, marketing performance data. Data that reveals customer behaviour, data that attributes marketing inputs to business performance outcomes, and data that explains who’s seen which commercials, where, and how often. The sheer volume of data in marketing means that practitioners are faced with a delicious paradox: it has never been more challenging to make sense of all the data that swirls around a brand, and at the same time it has never been more possible to do so.

The storytelling potential of data transcends marketing. Data-driven storytelling offers potential right across business and society. We are all, as writer Dan Pink says, in the “moving business”; the business of persuading others to take action and respond to the stories we tell. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman has crystallised what we know about human decision-making. We make decisions fast using what Kahneman calls System 1 thinking, based on our emotional response to situations and stimuli. We then justify our decisions using slower, more cognitive thought processes, using System 2 thinking. This is where the rationality of well-presented facts, numbers, and data has a critical role to play. The most powerful and influential stories are those that appeal to both our emotions and our intellect. It can be argued, therefore, that the central equation underpinning success in the modern knowledge economy is this:

ANALYTICS + STORYTELLING = INFLUENCE.

Since marketing is the best established of the “moving businesses”, the equation has particular resonance in marketing.

WHERE TO START

It’s a common misconception that using data and statistics to build more powerful and purposeful stories is about collecting and deploying as many numbers as you can to make your point. Yet social psychology 101 tells us that the more information you deploy in arguments when you’re looking to convince others to take a course of action – and particularly when you want to change people’s minds – the more likely the audience is to resist. In recent years, this has been labelled the “Project Fear” phenomenon, after the large number of data sources and data-driven scenarios the Remain campaign deployed in the run-up to the 2016 EU Referendum in the UK.

Using data and statistics as the rational underpinning to well-balanced, emotional, and above all human stories is much more about the judicious use of a small number of well-chosen data points to support an appeal or call to action. This makes data-driven storytelling fundamentally an act of empathy. It requires the narrator to imagine what it’s like to be in the shoes – the mind; the mindset – of the audience. And to realise what it feels like to be assaulted with number after data point after statistic. Browbeating the audience into submission not only doesn’t work; it’s actively counter-productive. Lightly peppering narratives with just a handful of well-chosen, killer statistics is the key to data-driven storytelling success.

ESSENTIALS

1. KEEP IT SIMPLE – YET SMART

When you’ve thoroughly researched and understood a brand, a market, or an issue, the temptation is to share your depth of knowledge and understanding. Market researchers are particularly guilty of wanting to show all their workings out – all the data that underpins the insights they bring to their clients – but they’re not the only breed of communicators who fail to keep it simple. Clients don’t pay agencies to take them through their workings out and justify why they reached the conclusions they reached. Consumers don’t want a complete rationale of the thinking – and increasingly the data, numbers, and statistics – that underpin a campaign. Both want to know what they should do in simple, simplified terms.

Keeping it simple – yet smart – avoids the storytellers no-no of exposition or backstory. How much better as a storyteller to have the audience hanging on every twist in the story and begging for more – the next storyline, the next episode – than to be bored into submission. Building simple yet smart stories with data as the rational underpinning isn’t necessarily easy to pull off. As Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and Winston Churchill are all said to have said: “I would have written you a shorter letter but I didn’t have the time.”

2. FIND AND USE ONLY RELEVANT DATA

There are so many different sources of data available to brands and companies today – their own data, third-party data, and publicly-available data sets – that it’s hard to choose data that is relevant to the story you’re looking to build. Brand data can include: first-party customer journey data, social and news media content, sales data, employee attitudes and behaviours. Third-party and publicly-available data can include: analyst commentary, Government demographic data, wealth and health data, weather data, academic and peer-reviewed research, crime statistics. You name it, it’s probably been counted, analysed, and shared online.

The trick in finding and using only relevant data is to identify and deploy the corner of Big Data – what the Small Data Forum podcast calls “little big data” – that’s relevant to the hypothesis you’re trying to test, and not just what happens to be available, convenient, or easy to use. Brand storytellers should use the principles set out by writer and TED Talk favourite, Simon Sinek, and “start with why”; start with the reason or purpose they’re looking for data in the first place, and then choose the right data.

3. AVOID FALSE POSITIVES

The trouble with there being lots of potential data sets available to those looking to build brand narratives is that, when you put them together, you’re likely to find connections between different variables that are most likely meaningless. There’s every possibility that, if you’re looking to prove (rather than test) a hypothesis by putting all available data into the mixer and seeing where there might be a relationship, you’ll find something and be tempted to conclude you’ve found something important when in fact it’s a false positive. Remember the statistician’s acronym GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

As creatures, we’re hard-wired to look for relationships between variables – and the simpler the connection the better. We find it satisfying to conclude “the Gulf War was all about oil” or “Brexit was caused by unjustified fear of migrants”. Trouble is, complex connections in complex systems are very rarely caused by single factors. They’re also unlikely to be directly causally-connected. More often than not there’s a hidden third cause that you’ll have completely overlooked if you haven’t first kept it simple and second found and used only relevant data. Remember also that correlation is most definitely not causation.

4. BEWARE THE CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE

When you know a lot about a subject, it’s very hard to imagine what it’s like not to know what you know. This is called the Curse of Knowledge. In his book The Sense of Style, Harvard psychologist Steve Pinker calls out academics, government officials, lawyers, financial advisors, and many of those in Big Pharma to be among the worst afflicted by this condition.

Like using too much or irrelevant data, the Curse of Knowledge is a significant turn-off for an audience. They feel talked down to – patronised – and ignorant in the face of an expert not prepared to come down to their level. Unsurprisingly, this approach – such a common failing among those who use data and statistics in their storytelling – is also counter-productive. It’s as unengaging as showing your workings out and convinces almost no one.

5. KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

Effective data-driven storytelling is fundamentally an act of empathy and human understanding. If you can use your research, data, and statistics to show you understand those you’re looking to influence, your story is much more likely to prove effective. The dictionary definition of insight is “a profound or deep understanding of someone or something”, and if you can use data and statistics to get under the skin and into the mindset and motivations of your audience, they’re very much more likely to be receptive to your message. The case studies on Sport England and Dove, below, show how data-driven insights can spark social and market change.

6. TALK HUMAN

It’s a curious truism of corporate behaviour that many companies and brands – including some of the most successful B2C brands, and many B2B – speak a dialect that is very unlike the way that people talk. Those mandated to talk on behalf of a company – a growing pool of individuals in our social media age in which many more voices matter – often adopt a pretentious, jargon-rich way of speaking that explains little and convinces very few. When data and statistics are at the heart of the story you’re looking to build, this problem can be made worse. Corporate and brand storytellers should resist this temptation and use numbers to support not dominate their narratives. They should use a range of emotions and talk in that rarest of corporate dialects: human.

CASE STUDIES

BRITISH HEART FOUNDATION – STAYING ALIVE

The British Heart Foundation wanted to raise awareness of how to perform hands-only CPR to restart someone’s heart if they’ve had a heart attack. Using black humour and football hard man Vinnie Jones – just featured as a gangland villain in Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels – the BHF managed to balance the rational with the emotional in a core campaign ad full of both information and entertainment. One of the most important pieces of information they needed to convey was the pace with which first aiders need to pump the chest of a heart attack victim, which is a couple of times every second. The planners on the BHF campaign found and used relevant data – that the Bee Gees’ disco classic Staying Alive is played at 110-120bpm – and used that as the incongruent (and memorable) soundtrack to Jones’ infomercial.

SPORT ENGLAND – THIS GIRL CAN

From early in secondary school onwards, right up until after retirement age, girls and women take part in less regular sport than boys and men; there truly is a gender exercise gap. Sport England wanted to bring about sustainable behaviour change in girls and women. Their research found that one of the main drags on women’s participation in sport was the fear of being judged by others – of sweating, make-up running, flushed cheeks, wearing unflattering Lycra, being seen out of control. 85% or women who don’t exercise say it’s for fear of being judged. And they were right – at least partially. 85% of those who see women exercising do judge them – and they do so entirely positively. They admire real women really exercising. It makes them think “I should do that!” Hence the real women that have featured in every one of the campaign’s three ads, a campaign which has led 1.6m more women to take up exercise. Sport England truly does know its audience.

DOVE – CAMPAIGN FOR REAL BEAUTY

Another brand that knows its audience and that found and used relevant data as the rational underpinning of its campaigning is Dove and its 15 year-old Campaign for Real Beauty. Back in the early 2000s, most beauty brand communication was having a negative impact on women’s self-esteem and sense of self-worth. Cross-cultural research by Dove found that in 20 countries – from Thailand to Brazil, from Russia to India – just 2% of the world’s women would use the word “beautiful” to describe themselves. This gave Dove the legitimacy to take on the beauty industry on behalf of real women, to celebrate ‘real types not stereotypes’, and to feature real women – real beauty – in their category-redefining campaign. Once the data-driven insight informed new product formulation, too, sustainable conversations with teens, tweens, and women turned into growing and sustained growth and profit for the Unilever brand.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

In his introduction his book the The Signal & The Noise, Nate Silver observes: “The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning.” It’s a sentiment repeated by Cambridge statistics professor David Spiegelhalter in the introduction to his 2019 book, The Art of Statistics.

If you keep it simple yet smart with numbers, you’re off to a good narrative start. Find and use only meaningful statistics but avoid false positives when two data points or series seem to be connected. Beware the Curse of Knowledge, a fundamentally arrogant and inhuman way to share data and statistics that you know and understand but that your audience doesn’t. Data storytelling is at its heart an act of empathy that requires skilled practitioners to know their audience – to get inside their minds – and ultimately to talk that rarest of corporate and brand dialogues: human.

Statistics can power stories and numbers drive narratives. But only if as a storyteller you are able to resist the seductive lure of data to tell the story for you or – worst of all – be presented as the story itself.