Big data, big advertising…what about big emotion?

Watching reaction to the Publicis and Omnicom merger has been like the old story of the blind men and the elephant.

The beast being created is so enormous that everybody trying to grasp it is focusing on a different thing – what it means for clients, what it means for different countries, how researchers might react.

One thing everyone seems to agree on – because the firms themselves led with it as a reason – is that the merger was driven by big data. Specifically, Publicis Chief Maurice Levy has said the merger will let the new firm compete better in the arena of personalisation and targeting – using data to create 'a message that is relevant to a very narrow audience'.

This deal marks the high point of targeting as a philosophy – the idea that the more tailored you make advertising, the more successful it will be. A huge amount of money is flowing into web and customer analytics to help start-ups and existing firms target consumers; according to the New York Times, salesforce.com has spent $4bn in recent years on advertising-related acquisitions alone.

With this amount riding on it, personalisation has to work, and be seen to work. And from a behavioural point of view, highly targeted ads delivered 'just in time' make a lot of sense. Behavioural design is all about building a path to a decision so people don’t have to think hard about it. Most decisions are made with what Daniel Kahneman calls 'System 1', implicit thinking, so you want to make the preferred decision as easy, quick to take and emotionally satisfying as possible. So making a suggestion near the moment of decision, about something you know someone is interested in, might very well pay off.

Hyper-targeting

But from a broader advertising perspective this kind of hyper-targeting risks leaving a lot out. Big data isn’t our first attempt to apply science to marketing – there is already a lot of strong evidence in marketing science for what works. For instance, we know from the work of Andrew Ehrenberg and associates that targeting in general isn’t a great idea, simply because loyalty is something of a chimera. Most purchases aren’t made by loyal customers, but from the great mass of other people buying your brand. So how useful can personalisation really be?

Countering that, you might argue that data-driven marketing will be able to predict interest as well as respond more accurately to it. But even then there’s a bigger picture. How do you build positive emotional impressions around a brand in the first place, in order to make building that path at decision time possible?

Again, marketing science already has many of the answers. In analysts’ Les Binet and Peter Field’s latest book, The Long And The Short Of It, they crunch IPA data to examine how ad campaigns create real business effects over the long term. Their conclusion is simple: ads that build brands long-term are designed to create fame, and work by creating positive emotion, rather than transmitting a message. Advertising – big, fame-generating advertising – helps create positive emotions and makes building that path to System 1 decisions easier.

Putting emotion at the heart of it

In a just-in-time, personalised big data world, that kind of broadly appealing advertising isn’t quite so fashionable – but it’s still critically important, because it’s so good at building long-term positive emotion for a brand. It’s also vital to measure it right. Most ad testing now claims to measure emotion, but its core models are still based on metrics like persuasion and brand recall. Putting emotion at the centre of the model is the only way to predict the long term business effects Binet and Field identified.

We are still at a very early stage in the big data revolution – and this giant merger is at most the end of the beginning. It may be that the emotional, long-term benefits data-driven marketing can deliver will one day match or surpass those generated by fame ads. But for the moment, personalised marketing is far from a certain bet – and even a giant new company should not forget its advertising roots.

Tom Ewing is the digital culture officer at BrainJuicer. Read more from them in our Clubhouse.