We hear a lot about the end of the Mad Men era lately – from its allusions to the cultural traits of the 60s and early 70s and advertising as it once was.

It was a time where the Big Data revolution hadn’t yet taken place. But perhaps the empathy and insight shown by Don Draper into the human psyche is something to hold onto for a little longer, for the sake of innovation and all the good that’s in it for the people.

To be clear, the empirical nature of Big Data is certainly good to have in our world of products and advertising. It appeases the stress of everyday business – helping us make safe decisions to avoid failure and to target products and ads more accurately. In time, it can even help improve products and build loyalty. Clients want it. Agencies want it.

Barack Obama’s successful 2012 re-election campaign’s “measured everything to ensure being smart about everything”. AT&T’s “It’s Not Complicated” is one of the most successful TV spot ever made based on a massive three-year big-data project.

But Big Data is no springboard for innovation and disruption.

Advertising creatives restlessly seek new ways to inspire and surprise as they strive to design the right customer journeys for a non-liner culture. It’s here that Big Data, with its promises of certainties based on the analysis of the past, can actually become a costly distraction. An uncompromised point of view and a heightened ability to empathise is what’s needed to create great products, not features dictated by data.

TV’s cultural implication is shifting. People’s mind-sets are spread across multiple devices. We’re in an age where empathy is the edge that lets us uncover people’s latent needs when we’re developing new campaigns and products.

The Don Drapers of our times – Steve Jobs, Phil Knight, Elon Musk and advertising creatives like Dan Wieden – have the gift of vision. For the rest of us, it’s about dedicating many hours to a process that helps us understand the intriguing, exciting and lesser-known impulses of our society. Because the skill of empathy is essential when we’re seeking to understand how things relate to one another, literally and figuratively. It’s our conduit to creativity. And it’s why we need to innovate.

Creative fluff, you say? Well, try not to tear up when watching P&G’s “Thank you, Mom” tv spot. Try to not get dreamy when using Airbnb.

As we follow that process, not only do we become better people but an empathetic behaviour also makes us better salesmen and women. The ability to understand and share the feelings of another is more essential to our cultural and media landscape that it was to advertising 50 years ago. Developing a vision, building a point of view or crafting a smart piece of hard/software has never been so central to touching people’s lives – and to changing behaviours.

So let’s stay mad, shall we?

 

By Sacha Reeb, Executive Creative Director of Critical Mass. 

PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.

comments powered by Disqus