In a trust vacuum, you’re lost.

BBDO is justifiably proud of its recent creative but seems a little muddled on the data/insight front.

Cristal Rix wants insights to be data driven, and that’s all well and good. You can do all sorts of clever stuff with data – so much so that data is apparently nothing more than insight that got a bum rap.

But there’s a thing: insight has intrinsic value.

And since the slap in the face that was the US Presidential election, no-one – including Ms Rix, ironically enough – can be sure that reported data has anything of the sort.

Surveys are kinda bust.

Data only becomes a resource for knowledge when it’s representative, accurate and true. But there’s no obligation on any respondent to be truthful, and very little vestigial homogeneity anywhere in any case.

A respondent would nudge herself towards BBDO’s busy, health-conscious mom segment rather than be seen as a bad parent by declaring a penchant for indolent days of weed smoking. Just as she would say “Hillary all the way” in preference to being considered

a) selfish for not wanting to give a little out of her millions to educate the poor, or

b) a racist.

So you can throw great mining and management software at poor data and you won’t get rich insight or dynamic segmentations. Because insight has value and segmentations must have validity. In a trust vacuum, you’re lost.