Between The Spreadsheets
In the 5th century BC, followers of Pythagoras, the famed Greek mathematician and philosopher, started a cult. This cult believed the perfect rationality of mathematics could explain all phenomena in the universe. When one of the cult’s own members, Hippasus of Metapontum, discovered something called irrational numbers, disproving the transcendent power of math, it’s said the cult threw Hippasus into the sea. Their idea of perfect order would not be disturbed.
In subsequent centuries, people have continued to make herculean efforts to map out and explain human behavior: The Golden Ratio (the nature sequence, not the Ace of Base album). Genetic Codes. Predictive Artificial Intelligence. Mood Rings.
As anyone who has attempted to predict the stock market can report, there remains something called irrationality that always seems to disturb the best-laid plans. Humans don’t do what they should, mathematically speaking. Brain imaging has revealed the mind to be a cauldron of hopes, imagination, and spontaneity colliding into reason, practicality and logic. Fitting this strange brew into an equation has proven eternally difficult.
Despite this, perhaps no industry has tried more than advertising. It remains an irresistibly seductive call: If an agency could place human response into a spreadsheet, they wouldn’t need to worry about the incertitude of the creative process (which is, if nothing else, the exploration of the vague space between numbers). To the MBA client-types, unpredictability is not a good sales pitch.
So on this straight line between math and creativity, agencies must make their stand.
One one end, we have marketing personas, audience segmentations, psychographics, KPIs, focus groups, analytics, matrices (which - cover your eyes, creatives - is the plural of matrix). All of these aspire to bring some order to chaos. Form shape out of irrationality. And, as one who has learned to depend upon these things, it’s clear - to an extent - they have. When taken too far, however, you end up with this.
On the other end, we have the shapeless, nebulous world of instincts, guts, colors, words, jokes, shapes, imagination. Most creatives would prefer to live in this space full-time. The obvious danger of this world is hubris. A creative will insist their idea is good, when all available data confirms that it is not.
Having worked at agencies at both ends of the spectrum, we must not forget what Hippasus learned centuries ago. Math exists. But so does non-math. We are neither, and we are both. There is no answer, and there are a thousand answers. Irrationality is as much a part of us as our body weight.
People are not millennials. They are not working moms. They are not 45 - 54 years old, nor predictable sets of behavioral units and integers. They are human beings. Each different, each unique. It’s OK to try and measure them, as the followers of Pythagorus once did. But go too far, and your ideas will be thrown into the sea.
