Observation and 'Insights'

by Daniel Rembeth

I write this on the eve of Citra Pariwara 2005 in Surabaya. Though I won’t be there, I feel the needs of pouring my heart and thinking to my creative, account management and planner colleagues in the advertising industry.
As a start, recently MPA issued compelling new insights on how and why readers engaged with magazines. It was mentioned that ‘people read magazines to relax’ and valued them because ‘they contain lots of information’… duh

Well, these insights is rank with so many of the great ‘insights’ I’ve been exposed to, and I confess, been done also by yours truly over the years; such as ‘mother likes to take care of her family’ or ‘teens value their independency’ and in numerous occasion ‘Indonesian is open hearted and warm people’. This is not great insights, at best they are interesting truths, or observations.

Think of insights as the statement of understanding to the heart of the problem. Think moments of creativity and profound illumination (something I’ve not had that many in all years I’ve worked in this business)
When you look into the advertising industry, you realize that we have obsessed by insights, particularly of the consumer kind. The process in place and we glorified the functions as the most importance element in the modern strategic thinking. Every single brief now hast to have an insight statement.

In return, we have commoditized the term. There is no quality control, there’s no recognition of how hard they are to come by and what really means to have one. At the same time we put the word on a pedestal. When presented with the insight, how do we argue that, for instance, it’s just a relevant research finding, one piece of the jigsaw that helps us achieve the breakthrough? More often than not, we get stuck working out how to execute this relatively straight forward observation.

Worse, looking for insights has become a process that the consumer is expected to lead. When in fact it is a creative exercise that should be owned by the brand and agency. After all consumer is at the end of recipient chain, and mostly least skilled to help us achieve that goal.

Finally, our obsession with the consumer means we tend to overlook and ignore other areas of inspiration, we forget that the brand we work on, our competition and category, and our CULTURE at large are territories worth investigating.
Let us do start doing it. I certainly hope that before I end my career in the industry, I will a proud witness the glory of one Indonesia’s ad win the grand clio or the golden lion.