Admap Prize 2015 Entry Form and Guidelines

Thank you for downloading the Admap Prize 2015 Entry Form and Guidelines.

Please take a few minutes to read this form and its requirements.The Gold Award will be made to the essay that best addresses the topic: Does Big Data inspire or hinder creative thinking?

Judges will score essays for the quality of their ideas, argument, evidence and writing style. Essays should be between 2,000 and 2,500 words long.

When you have completed your essay, email it to admap.prize@warc.com. The essay should be submitted in Word format in the original font on this entry form (in the space below).

If you have not done so already, you should read The Admap Prize 2015 Terms & Conditions.

Before you start completing this form, please also read the bullet points below. They are designed to help you fill out your entry form in the fullest and most efficient way possible.

Ensure you give a source for any data included in your entry form or any claim you make about the evidence for your essay idea.

The deadline for entries is February 16, 2015. For updates follow colin_admap on Twitter or by reading Admap magazine by subscribing to the print or iPad edition at www.warc.com/myadmap, or refer to the Admap Prize site at www.warc.com/admapprize2015. To receive a deadline reminder, you can also email admap.prize@warc.com, putting “Reminder” in the subject line.

To be eligible for The Admap Prize, your work should be original, unpublished and represent your own original thinking.

Essays will put forward arguments that answer the central question – Does Big Data inspire or hinder creative thinking? Big Data and its application in marketing is a topic that is being hotly argued in all corners of our industry. The gathering of data, its manipulation and its employment is fundamental to the future of marketing. In some quarters, Big Data is seen as a panacea for all marketing’s ills, a kind of Holy Grail quest to form one-to-one relationships with customers, eliminating all marketing wastage. Others view Big Data as the enemy at the gates, a dagger in the heart of creativity.Between these polar extremes, most people accept that the mass of data now being generated from consumer activity can be a positive if channelled appropriately. Among the issues that essay entrants might consider in addressing the topic are: Can data assist the creative process? How can it assist in the development of the big idea, or the little idea? How can data finesse the media strategy? How will programmatic buying impact on media planning? How can brand marketers effectively integrate numerous datasets to optimise brand messaging to benefit consumers without annoying, or infringing data privacy protection?As can be seen, there are many ways one can address this central question. The above are just a few of the issues that might be considered. You may well have other ideas.

Your essay should be between 2,000 and 2,500 words long and should be submitted in Word document form in the English language and the original font. Supporting charts can be submitted as separate files to the essay. It is not obligatory to include charts and marks will not be lost if none are submitted.

Your work should be written as free-flowing, engaging narrative in the form of an essay, and not, for example, in the form of a Powerpoint presentation. Marks will be awarded on the following basis:

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Idea (25% of marks). Marks will be scored for the originality of the central idea, the strength of the idea and how practical it is in terms of its relevance and application in marketing.Argument (25% of marks). Marks will be scored according to how convincing is the argument for the idea, how credible is the case made, and the understanding of the issues involved.Evidence (25% of marks). Marks will be scored for the strength of the evidence that supports the idea and the argument and how well it demonstrates the practical application of the idea. This might include real brand case examples.Writing style (25% of marks). Marks will be scored for the way in which the idea, arguments and evidence are presented, how they flow, how well the paper communicates the thinking in the essay, how easy it is to understand the idea and how readable and engaging the essay is. Allowance will be made for authors for whom English is not their first language.

Now, please complete the following entry details:

Essay Title

So, what do you do for a living?

Author(s) Name(s) & Job Title(s)

Thomas Henry, Senior Strategist

Author(s) Company(-ies)

DARE

Author(s) Country of Residency

UK

Author(s) Email Address

Thomas.Henry@thisisdare.com

Author(s) Telephone

07749104463

Please signify that you have read and agree to the Terms & Conditions by typing I AGREE in the box right.

YES

Admap Prize 2015Does Big Data Inspire or Hinder Creative Thinking?

Essay title: So, what do you do for a living?Essay authored by: Thomas Henry

Write your essay here in between 2,000 and 2,500 words:

So, what do you do for a living?

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One Saturday night in the mid 1970s, creative maverick George Lois was on a TV talk show with the CEOs of two Madison Avenue giants.

"So Gentlemen,” the host asked, “what is advertising"?

The two establishment boys proceeded to wax lyrical about marketing, customer research and positioning.  As these two men in grey-flannel-suits congratulated one another on the fine and splendid points they were making, Lois looked dismayed.

"Mr Lois, you seem to be agitated. Don't you agree with this definition of your profession?"

Lois practically jumped out of his seat before spitting back in his thick, Bronx staccato.

"My profession? Geez, I don't think I work in the same business as those guys".

"OK Mr Lois”, the host asked, “what do you think advertising is"?

"Advertising? Advertising is poison gas. It should hit you in the mouth, like 'pow' you know? Your eyes should be stinging, your hands should go numb. You ‘oughta be gasping for breath with your heart pounding a hundred miles an hour when you see it. That's what I think advertising is".   

*

“Diamonds are lumps of coal that stuck at it no matter how much heat or pressure they faced”. Jeffrey Fry

Forty years after George Lois’ plea for creativity, our industry is just as far away from answering the same question posed that night - what exactly is it we do for a living? The answer is crucial to thinking about whether big-data inspires or hinders creative thinking in advertising.

I’ve chosen to limit this essay to creative thinking in advertising because it’s the industry I feel most qualified to comment on. Even then, it’s a pretty big task.

For example, last year we were told that the Publi-Com merger would pave the way for the future of advertising. ‘Big networks’ would use ‘big-data’ to create ‘scalable solutions’ that provided ‘operational efficiencies’. I for one struggled to see what any of that had to do with my day job.

I don’t think big-data is hindering creativity in advertising because I don’t think there’s any evidence to show that big-data has an impact on creativity in advertising. It’s like asking if the sun has an impact on the size of sausage rolls in Doncaster.

What I do think could affect creativity in advertising is the misplaced pursuit of big-data solutions as a panacea; the idea that an ever-expanding spreadsheet can solve all client business problems. Such a pursuit diverts time, energy, resources and client good will away from creating ideas that can change businesses.

Now, I'm a planner, so of course I think big-data is interesting, but as a northerner I reckon it’s just coal, fields and fields of coal. And creative agencies don’t sell coal. We sell diamonds.

All diamonds start as coal, but not all the coal makes it through to being a diamond. Throughout the strategy process you’re constantly labouring to apply analytic pressure and creative heat to raw data, trying to turn it into something valuable. In the end you actually discount lots of data because it’s not the amount of coal that’s important in getting you a diamond, it’s all about what certain lumps of coal

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reveal when you turn up the pressure and the heat. That’s about bringing together the right information to help you arrive at an insight that leads to a diamond worth paying for.

To be clear, I love using data, but I also see its limitations no matter its size.

My dad founded a direct marketing agency in the 80s, just as digital databases became popular. When I was 16, I worked for him as a copywriter and became fascinated by data driven creativity. One day I asked him “why don’t you just write all the copy based on data? Only use the adjectives that test well, the punch lines, the intros and outros”?

My dad smiled at me and said; “We could do son, but what I’ve found is that data only ever tells you where not to go, it never tells you where you need to go”.

I didn’t understand what that meant until I became a planner, then, it suddenly made all the sense in the world. Data doesn’t guarantee you will produce ideas that work for your client; therefore, time spent in pursuit of bigger data is wasted and hinders your ability to produce diamond quality creative work.

Where’s my evidence? Let’s have a look.

“Emotion leads to action, whereas reason leads to conclusions” Donald Calne

One of the main reasons that there is no empirical link between big-data and creativity in advertising is that data is objective, rational information and creativity is subjective, emotional information.

This is important because, as shown in the work by Binet & Field1as well as Byron Sharp,2 advertising is effective by building and maintaining memory structures. The best way to do that is to establish emotional connections in the mind of the customer. What we generally term ‘creativity’ is the way in which these emotions are articulated through a medium: communications, service design or products.

This building and maintaining of memories through emotion is effective because human decision-making is a thoroughly emotional process. As famed behavioural economist Daniel Khaneman put it:

“We think that we're much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even though it's the other way around. We believe the reasons, because we've already made the decision”.3

Prior to advances in analytical psychology that facilitated Khaneman’s work on ‘system one and two’ thinking, Antonio Damasio reached similar conclusions in his seminal text, “Descartes’ Error”. 4

Damasio showed that that the brain often ‘chooses’ among alternatives in decision making by ‘marking’ one alternative as more emotionally salient than another.

The key case study Damasio cited was of ‘Elliot’, a patient who’d had parts of his prefrontal cortex removed because of a brain tumour. The prefrontal cortex classifies experiences emotionally as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

1 ”The Long and The Short of It” by Les Binet and Peter Field, 2013 2 “How Brands Grow” by Byron Sharp, 20123 “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, 20114 ”Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain” by Antonio Damasio, 1994

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Without his prefrontal cortex ‘Elliot’, had been robbed of the ability to perform emotional classifications when making decisions. It would take him three hours to order a sandwich because – rationally – what is the difference between a tuna salad on rye, and a chicken salad on rye? They’re both protein based with a similar nutrient content. They are both pleasing to eat. How do you make a rational choice quickly and efficiently?

‘Elliot’ was the perfect consumer in an economist’s mind; a rational agent who could weigh up information and maximise his utility based on objective criteria. But what drives every economist crazy is that they know this is not possible. Harvard Professor of Psychology Dan Gilbert explains why:

“Our brains are bad at two things: accurately estimating the odds that our choices will lead to success, and making huge errors in estimating the value of the success of those choices”.5

Because the rational decision making bit of our brain isn’t very good, emotional decision making is essential to normal human functioning.

When launching products like ‘Google Glass’, Eric Schmidt is fond of reminding us that we now create more data each year than we did from the birth of Christ to 2003. He would argue that, in this 'information age' the scale of the data has fundamentally changed the applicability of it.  But big-data is still just rational information, so no matter how much of it we have, it’s not going to help us better understand the emotional context in which decisions are made. If we’re after creative diamonds, more coal isn’t the answer.

The truth is that, as Bill Bernbach so elegantly put it, creativity in advertising does not appeal to changing man, it appeals to unchanging man - a wonderfully inefficient, beautifully fragile cipher for past experiences and future dreams.

That hasn’t changed just because Google invented glasses we can talk to.

“ I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” Sir Isaac Newton

So if big-data has a limited applicability to the kind of creativity that can influence emotional memory and decision-making, then perhaps it could be useful in establishing a more creative approach to audience analysis and understanding of large scale behaviour?

Well, the world’s best economists and mathematicians aren’t convinced. The search for a link between big-data and human behaviour is sometimes referred to as ‘physics envy’ by economists:

“Physics envy: the need to reduce a series of complicated situations to clear, broadly applicable lessons. But while the laws of gravity and thermodynamics work the same way in Vancouver, Seoul or Athens, businesses do not.”6

This disconnect is caused by the difference between ‘complicated systems’ and ‘complex systems’. One you can model with data and the other you can’t, no matter how much data you have.

Professor Eve Middleton-Kelly, Director of The Complexity Research Group at the London School of Economics explains:

5 “Why We Make Bad Decisions” at TEDGlobal by Professor Dan Gilbert. 2005 6 “The Physics Envy Problem”, by The Economist, 2011

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“Complicated systems are machine type systems, you can design them and you can predict their behaviour. A complicated system would be something like a jet engine, it has lots of interdependent moving parts, but they can be designed so we can predict the outcome every time”.7

Good news for frequent flyers!

In advertising, a complicated system could be a website, an app or an in-store environment. Systems we have designed in order to generate certain outcomes. But we cannot do this with a complex system. Professor Eve Middleton-Kelly again:

“Complex systems are different because they create new structures through the interactions of agents within the system. They are not just made complex by the interaction of these agents, they are made complex by the new layers of interdependence that arise as a result of this connectivity”.8

This characteristic of complex systems is known as ‘emergence’, the process whereby larger patterns arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties. This is the kind of system we traditionally deal with in advertising; a market, a category or interactions between platforms. These complex systems cannot be definitively modeled with data.

Ian Stewart, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick, gives a beautiful example of this using the human brain:

“You can write down mathematical equations that are good representations or predictions of what individual neurons do. But when you connect billions of neurons together, you get consciousness. There is nothing in the structure of an individual neuron that says it has to form consciousness. And yet, we know that all the wonderful things the brain does happen through neurons exchanging electrical and chemical signals along a network”.9

So if world class academics can only model the complicated parts of complex systems, how do they make sense of it all? Through focus groups of course. Professor Eve Middleton-Kelly again:

“When we try to understand the behavior of humans, we need to talk to them. It isn’t enough to understand the numbers; we need to understand the ‘why.’ Why do people interact in the way they do and why does it change under certain circumstances? To understand those ‘whys’ you need to use qualitative, critical analysis, because in no way can we predict how individuals will behave or react”.10

So how does this help us to know whether chasing big-data is a waste of time that detracts from diamond-quality creativity?

Well, if world class economists and mathematicians can only model the complicated parts of complex systems to investigate human behavior, I don’t think creative agencies can do any better.

“We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.” G.K. Chesterton

So if we’re not in the business of big-data efficiency, what do we do for a living?  As Rory Sutherland put it, our job is to turn human insight into business advantage.

7 “Complexity”, on BBC R4 In Our Time, 20138 “Complexity” , on BBC R4 In Our Time, 20139 “Complexity” on BBC R4 In Our Time, 201310 “Complexity” on BBC R4 In Our Time, 2013

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The leap that gets you from A to B in that sentence is creativity; seeing information in a different way to anyone else, and then having the passion to steal from every genius you’ve ever loved to put something out there that blows the bloody doors off.

Turning insight into business advantage could mean repositioning a button on a website to increase revenue, or changing the music on an ad to completely alter the meaning. These things could be costly or practically free, but they use creativity to solve problems with disproportionate effect.

That’s real efficiency, when you can think someone rich. 

The one thing that can never work to solve complex problems is a spreadsheet driven dictum deciding what, when and how to influence human decisions. Big-data can be useful but it doesn't inspire creativity, it makes existing systems more efficient, allows quicker decisions and more frequent actions.

But that's not creativity, that's optimization. There’s a huge difference. It's the difference between mixing paint to please the eye and a Rothko masterpiece. It’s the difference between rotating banner ad copy and Monty the penguin.

Creativity in advertising is about finding ways to get to ‘unchanging man.’ I think we have to remain humble in that pursuit because it is one that’s troubled humanity’s greatest minds.

To think that the awesome majesty of the human race can be represented on a spreadsheet is to be derelict in our duty. Famed Stanford University neuro-biologist Professor Robert Sapolsky said:

“Even if we learn about how everything works, that doesn't mean anything. You can turn Bach into contrapuntal equations; that doesn't reduce in the slightest our capacity to be thrilled by his overture thundering away in our chest.”11

We know that human decision-making is emotional and that many of the systems we deal with in advertising are complex. Big-data has a limited ability to help with either of these things. Therefore I believe that the pursuit of big-data is a drain on valuable resources and therefore a hindrance to creativity.

Man’s response to great creativity is not driven by what he knows to be objectively true, but by what he feels to be emotionally right. By primal wonder, not contemporary wonders.

It might not quite be George Lois' plea for poison gas, but I for one will breathe easier knowing that what I do for a living is find creative ways to solve business problems that help my clients win.

And there is no button for ‘win’ in Excel.

When you have written your essay, please email it to admap.prize@warc.com, attaching any supporting files you may wish to send.

Remember the deadline for submission of essays is February 16, 2015.

Good luck. We look forward to reading your work.

11 “A Primate’s Memoir”, by Robert Sapolsky, 2002

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©Warc Ltd 2014

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