Alternative Facts. Is the marketing industry guilty of Trump-like behaviour?
I spent the years between 2003 to 2016 specialising in marketing effectiveness. Designing studies, delivering them and advising clients. While marketing might not be the most trusted profession (only 3% of Americans trust marketers https://research.hubspot.com/charts/marketing-and-sales-not-considered-trustworthy and 80% of CEOs don’t trust marketers — ouch https://www.fournaisegroup.com/CEOs-Do-Not-Trust-Marketers/) I like to think that I spent those years in pursuit of the truth. I genuinely wanted to discover new insights about the way marketing worked, to understand why some communications were incredibly powerful and others not.
The biggest challenge I came across during that time was the inability of some to deal with facts. If they didn’t like the answers a study had produced, they would attack the approach and find ways to say that it was wrong. I am not suggesting accepting every piece of information at face value is the right thing to do: it is of critical importance to have a thorough understanding of what sits under a piece of data.
I’m also not talking about people having robust debates and then coming to a reasonable, rational conclusion based on a fair assessment of the evidence. I’m talking about people having pre-formed, protectionist agendas of what they need to “prove”.
Agendas are necessary in life — they provide the direction and values that drive people to get things done. But when they fly in the face of reason and facts they are just plain wrong. Many of us have laughed — and just despaired — at the “alternative facts” referenced by Donald Trump’s administration. But I think there are many of us in the marketing industry who are guilty of adopting the same position. There is a quote attributed to the psychoanalyst Carl Jung that neatly sums it up: “People cannot stand too much reality.” Or, to borrow from something more popular, the dramatic climax of one of my favourite films, A Few Good Men, where a snarling Jack Nicholson says to Tom Cruise: “you can’t handle the truth”.
The motivation that drives this behaviour is often the fear of making a mistake. For the ad agency, the media agency, the media owner, and the marketing client — no one wants to be wrong, because it suggests that we don’t know what we’re doing in the first place. Why did we sell in that plan or that new activity only to see it fail? We won’t be getting that additional budget again.
This fear of failure, losing credibility and dogmatic adherence to a pre-defined agenda inhibits the opportunities to learn. If you’ve already made up your mind on what a piece of analysis is going to show, it’s just a tick-box exercise; the opportunity to actually learn something new or interesting is wasted.
In the real world decisions need to made using the information currently available. Often, we cannot predict the outcome of a decision precisely, because there is insufficient data. The most effective way to deal with this is to be transparent about what is known and what is not known, which makes me think of another prominent US politician, Donald Rumsfeld: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns It also requires us to put sufficient effort into planning what data is going to be needed to prove or disprove our hypotheses.
The best pieces of work that I did during my marketing effectiveness career were those where we were able to work as agency and client to bring together multiple facts, often seemingly conflicting, to build an understanding of not just what was happening, but to create hypotheses that could explain why.
The data revolution is here, and CMOs / CEOs intend to do something with that, with 75% of marketers saying that they find attribution “critical”, or “very important” to the success of their efforts, and nearly 60% reporting that they plan to take the definitive step of changing their attribution model in 2017: http://www.thedrum.com/news/2017/03/07/marketers-are-increasingly-turning-away-last-click-attribution .
I believe data makes us better, if we use it to make us wiser. In my marketing utopia, agencies and clients pursue a learning agenda together — to do tests, to find out what works and why, what doesn’t work and why. It takes courage to pursue the truth if there’s a chance it might prove you were wrong. But what else is there to do? Because everyone knows what alternative facts are, don’t they?
