#49 – On being stuck, embracing quantum, and homeopathic synthetic data
Hello!
A new issue of Strategy Bites lands in your inbox today, with questions ranging from why advertising is like quantum science, why the new dystopia is a stucktopia, why synthetic data is the homoeopathy of research, why binary thinking holds us back, why we’re measuring the wrong things, and why AI will make a difference.
Enjoy the clicks.
Six Links of Inspiration:
Quantum Advertising. This is a beautiful piece by Faris Yakob that you’ll see shared across your marketing feeds a lot in the next few days and weeks. Some interesting quotes from the article:
“In essence, by saying ‘marketing’ and ‘creative’ are ‘science’, they are communicating confidence that this will create predictable returns. This is inherently wrong, and leverages a cultural understanding of ‘science’ as something that is predictable. That is not what science is.”
And: “If creative work was deterministically predictable then movie studios would only release hits. It cannot work that way. Advertising is a complex system that various vested parties have tried to position as linear causality - but it’s not. The multiplicity of factors surrounding any individual purchase decision are impossible to enumerate.”Welcome to Stucktopia. Feeling stuck? You are not alone. Hillary Kelly, a literary critic, points to recent cultural products (books, films, series) whose dystopian themes all revolve around a sense of being stuck. Being stuck as the defining trauma of our (recent) time? She sees a big power struggle between an overclass, that tries to keep things “in place” and underdogs who are trying to break out of a system that isn’t working for them: “Every age gets the dystopian nightmares it most fears: In the 1930s and ’40s, it was George Orwell and Aldous Huxley’s visions of totalitarianism; at the millennium, it was dark imaginings of societal collapse, whether a zombie apocalypse or the hunger games. Our new fictional nightmares are all about being trapped: mice running in an endless maze, too cowed by the complexity of the system to plow through the dead ends and find freedom.”
Synthetic respondents are the homoeopathy of market research. This is an important read on a topic that we’ll all be dealing with in the not so distant future: synthetic data, i.e. data created not by observing or interrogating humans but LLMs (or other dubious methods.) There are businesses popping up at every corner and it’s going to get harder and harder to resist the temptation of the (fake?) benefits they offer. Nik lays out why he thinks we should stay vigilant, critical, and resist to feed the fake data cottage industry.
Binary Thinking. I enjoyed this post from Mark on the challenge on breaking away from binary thinking, despite its allure and promise of seeming simplicity. “What I’ve failed to fully appreciate is to the extent that the binary is much more natural and prevalent in the world vs full spectrum thinking. That’s the plight of a strategist, to be a full spectrum thinker in a binary world. […] Binary thinking undermines possibilities. It may be more simple to digest, but it often forgoes truly transformational ideas.”
Marketers ‘preoccupied with wrong effectiveness metrics. We’re looking at the wrong effectiveness metrics. A study claims that campaign metrics tell us little about overall marketing effectiveness: “The research finds a 67% uplift in the number of business effects for those campaigns that avoid using ‘campaign delivery effects’ in their reporting. Those marketers who steer away from delivery effects in reporting are found to have a culture of effectiveness measurement that results in stronger overall business performance.”
AI & a better future for everyone. Germany has a new strategy conference and Matthias held one of the keynotes this year on the topic of AI. He has a bit of a reputation in the digital industry and so these slides are worth checking out.
Thank for your time and your patience in waiting for this edition for almost two months. (Where is the time going??) If you stumble upon interesting articles and pieces, feel free to share them with me – or chuck them into the comments.
Read you soon (see what I’m doing here?),
Maximilian