Emotional Data.
Between the data and the reality falls the shadow.
The shadow is the emotion, the stories, the messiness that humans have contained within us.
Today in the idolatry age of data and ai, those who rely on only on numbers and computation get it wrong and wrong and wrong.
People do not compute.
We choose with our hearts and then use numbers to justify what we just did.
Brands exist because humans are not computational, rational or decisive.
If it was just about data why would we buy expensive cars, luxury products and pay for experiences when we can watch the same experience for free on television?
Brands do not differentiate on the data but on provenance, design, story-telling, cultural resonance, mindset relevance and a spectrum of emotion.
Marketers who only believe in data will soon be unemployed since machines will do all the optimizing, personalizing and modelling better than any of us.
Even in an age of Agentic buying, humans will feed their desires and their dreams and a whole lot of constraints into our agents. Otherwise we would have to accept a 6 am flight on the now defunct Spirit Airlines since it was the most rational decision.
Our very existence and those of our children is a reminder of the power of emotion over data.
The ROI of children in mathematical and numerical terms makes no sense.
On a data driven basis, Russia should long time ago have overwhelmed Ukraine and Iran should have folded. The numbers were all superior on the side of Russia and the US. But the emotion, the raw need to survive and the asymmetrical thinking that a David brings against a Goliath spits in the face of data.
Data centers need gigawatts of energy while a human needs a cup of coffee and two slices of toast.
Our lack of logic will overwhelm the machines.
The love of a mother for a child and the power of desire overwhelms all rationality.
People vote not on data and facts but rather because of fear, hope, worry and vulnerability all of which machines fail to understand even though they may feign such understanding.
Taste, judgement, curation, sensitivity which people believe humans will need to differentiate are primarily emotional rather than rational.
Two different teams can interpret the same data in completely different ways so was it the the data or the people that came up with the recommendation? The most successful will not emit data but provide perspectives, provocations, points of of view and plans of action that fuse data and humanity.
The future is as much story as it is spreadsheet.
Artificial Intelligence or Cleverness will be a commodity like electricity.
Human Insight, Human Imagination, Human Inventiveness, Human Interaction and Human Inspiration will be the differentiator rather than the data.
There will be data data everywhere and so much AI that we will sink. We need insight, imagination, inventiveness and inspiration to help us think.
Like money, data is a great servant but a terrible master.
The math is already in the AI.
It is time to infuse the feeling.
Sir John Hegarty has described “Creativity is an expression of self.”
It is time for data that resonates with the human soul.
It is time for emotional data.
One Single Thing.
I have had the opportunity to learn and work with Sir John Hegarty and his team on some programs and I believe this conversation between Sir John and myself is worth a read and listen. The entire story is linked below but do read the how Sir John describes creativity at a minimum.
One day someone told Sir John Hegarty that the greatest art of all might be music.
Sir John believed it might be the second greatest art for and the greatest of all art is human life.
Human life is an act of creativity.
Sir John defines creativity as follows: Creativity is an expression of self.
Listen to the greatest creative people and you will hear them saying:
“Here is what I wanted to say”
“This is what I wanted to show”
“What I am trying to build”
There are two types of creativity one is pure and the other is applied.
Pure creativity is a spark that leads to the iPhone, creating the Simpsons or designing the Guggenheim in Bilboa. and also drives the greatest iconic works of art, product design and brand building.
Applied creativity is creating the next version of the iPhone, a new episode of The Simpsons or designing the stairs inside the Guggenheim.
Pure creativity is the greatest wealth creator and generator of growth ever.
Creativity drives innovation and the best creativity does not come from A/B testing, mathematics or focus groups.
It feeds on curiosity, instinct, exposure to differing perspectives, feelings and things that do not compute.
This AI versioning is not creativity that builds brands and growth but a smart way to get variations of a theme cost effectively get the lower funnel sale of a Brand that was which was built due to a different form of creativity.
A human creativity of self expression and not a machine variation of optimization and data co-relation.
AI will unleash human creativity but will not replace human creativity.
Read and listen to the entire piece here.