Creative intelligence and connecting with your audience

For this edition of my podcast, I interviewed Martin Adams, CEO of Codec. The company uses artificial intelligence to analyze hundreds of millions of content interactions, identifying audience networks that are most important to individual brands to allow them to optimize their marketing strategies. I put to him the description of Codec’s service I’d heard from someone else: that it’s like having 10,000 interns working for you to ask questions and make observations, then collating all the responses into a neat package. Martin didn’t disagree. However, he added that the value of Codec’s product came precisely from the scale of the analysis. It was only the huge volume of interactions concerned which made the insights accurate and meaningful.
Martin went on to explain that, when Codec was created, it was designed as a creative intelligence service for lay people like creatives and marketers, rather than a technical tool for data scientists. This decision was based on the idea that consumers search for products through engines like Google, so the best way to understand their actions was by emulation. As Martin put it: “We said we want to analyze the data that represents wider cultural interest and passions. So we went to social data and we said we will try and analyze the publicly available data and use algorithms to understand what is in that data, and then make that intelligible and useful and actionable for those brands.”
We talked about Codec’s modeling in greater depth. Martin said that they had set out wanting to dig deeper than simply a crude form of word association and instead look at people’s “passions,” the themes that interested them, and how they expressed that interest. What sort of content do they look for? Is it video, audio, or text? By understanding this kind of information, Codec can gain insight into the digital villages in which people exist.
One of the results of this kind of modeling and analysis was that there were surprises to be found. Martin told the story of an early client, a mattress manufacturer, which had assumed that the best and most appealing form of advertising to its target market would be a short, snappy kind of billboard, with sudden and direct impact. However, Codec’s analysis showed that the audience engaged far more with a text-heavy pitch, something which stood out from the crowd, and the outcome was that brand recall in London rose from 13% to 49% in a month.
The fundamental idea behind Codec was to release advertising from the cold mechanics of data science and reintroduce the human component. Martin said that, “One of our defining missions as a business when we started out was to help storytellers everywhere tell better stories… they can be counterintuitive sometimes. They always connect with human truth.” He rejected completely the idea that marketing could be format-driven, and instead argued that the content was all-important, especially in a huge, fragmented, multilingual, and multicultural market of a billion different platforms.
We moved on to the debate of man vs machine, and the power and potential of artificial intelligence. Martin rejected this as a false dichotomy, believing instead that it all depended on the spirit in which the machines were created, the intention behind their devising. His company has designed its systems with human creativity in mind, “an insight into what different audiences and communities in different markets care about, based on their content interactions.” His team was humble in their outlook and understood their relatively lowly place in the hierarchy of the digital space.
I wanted to know if Martin saw creative intelligence as a collection of distinct and separate disciplines. Should there be a border between data science and behavioral analysis? Should the difference between specialisms be like that in medicine, where, for example, a radiologist might identify a tumor but a surgeon would then physically remove it? Martin replied that, when Codec was founded, “the taxonomy that we built was a mixture of our own insight, and we brought sociologists in and digital anthropologists in.” This was a new approach, blending and combining expertise which had not been brought together before.
We concluded by discussing the present and the future, and the notion that brands now have better relationships with their customers than ever before: they nourish these relationships and tend them carefully, as they identify them as the most certain path to cultural resonance and financial success. Properly understanding that would, he said, put companies on the right side of history. Quite a claim!
Listen to the podcast episode this blog was inspired by https://www.creativeintelligence.fm/bringing-back-great-storytelling
