Forget "Art & Science," Give Me Reason & Whimsy

An Antidote to Marketers' Dangerous Desire for Certainty

The age of Art & Science in marketing has ended.

But before we dive into why, let’s dispel a myth:

The myth of “modern” marketing is that we can achieve certainty. As increasing access to data helped us evolve beyond “I don’t know which half of my marketing is working,” we took the promise of all that data and assumed a certitude that could never exist. We started to believe that we could now know what works, understand how every impression impacted (or didn’t) our business, and optimize our way to the platonic ideal of a marketing plan.

And as more and more marketing functions have become data-fueled, every agency, brand, and publisher waxes poetic with some iteration of how they use art and science to deliver results, to bring certainty to the chaos of today’s ecosystem. In short, ‘Art and Science’ aims to respond to the demand “Give me the answer.”

But this is an impossibility. The media landscape evolves too rapidly to allow for certain knowledge. The options and decision points multiply exponentially. More importantly, human behavior is uncertain. And marketing is about humans.  

Art and Science are broad notions that encompass wide-ranging subject matters. And since we’re no longer in 7th grade, we can’t teach them to employees or convert them into behaviors.

So it’s time we stop pretending marketing organizations are full of hybrid artist-scientists and instead focus on traits that we have more in common with every day people and that we can ingrain in our teams: reason and whimsy.

The synthesis of these two values turns modern media’s uncertainty into a competitive advantage for the marketers brave enough to seize it. Reason combines our experiences with data to create knowledge, and whimsy turns that knowledge into something new. All with the knowledge that THERE IS NO RIGHT ANSWER.

Reason, and the process of drawing logical inferences, recognizes the answers are not inherent in the data, but in the exploration and rationalization of that data. It’s the human capability that turns 1s and 0s into meaningful learnings and principles.

Whimsy, playfully imaginative curiosity, ensures those principles don’t become irrelevant by embracing our capacity to enjoy difficult questions, to continue playing with potential solutions.

At this point you are surely thinking that this was a delightfully wasteful semantic exercise (against a straw man, no less) with little real meaning. But there are real practical manifestations of the embrace of reason & whimsy:

From segments to people

Creative strategists love designing “pencil sketch” audiences: imagined, aspirational personas that reflect back what a brand wants to be perceived as. While data scientists want to define each consumer by a discreetly measurable attribute. But truly valuable audience insights reveal themselves in the margins of the data points.

In a “modern” marketing world increasingly obsessed with pipes, engines, stacks, and funnels, we risk losing touch with the fingers, toes, hearts, and minds that we need to move. Reason and whimsy are human traits, not academic subjects, and thus hold the key to unlocking undiscovered barriers and motivations of real people.

From certain answers to possible questions

I have seen elated clients congratulating themselves when a tactical creative update led to a tenth-of-a-point conversion rate boost, while ignoring the potential impact (or lack thereof) on the other 97% of the audience.

The desire for certainty leads us to focus on the questions that we can get numerical answers to, even if there are bigger challenges to address. Reason helps us step outside the data (while using it!) to consider what really matters, while whimsy imagines what could be instead of what already is.

From creative components to powerful ideas

The optimization capabilities of modern adtech enables the ability to scale and iterate creative executions beyond anything we’d ever dreamed. And AI (great, here we go…) will increase those capabilities exponentially. But those technologies can only ever focus on componentry—adjusting the pieces and arranging them in different ways. The most powerful, brand-defining, business-changing ideas can only come from outside the components.

The technology for building bridges had been around for almost 6,000 years, but it would take the introduction of steel wires to enable the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Human reason helps us reflect on existing creative components as whimsy inspires us to imagine new possibilities.

(Danger: Shameless plug incoming)

These are the foundational strategic principles that fuel our new company: Reason & Whimsy, a marketing shop for the post-modern media age.

Next week in Part 2, I’ll expand further on the Reason & Whimsy mission and explore how whimsy and reason helps overcome the most dangerous consequence of marketers’ assumption of certainty: fear.

This Week’s Whimsies

A useful reminder that every industry is full of experts who will make massive mistakes: Rolling Stone’s list of the 50 Worst Network TV Decisions. Come for the industry history, stay for the laughs.

Linguists have discovered the early emergence of a new accent in Antarctica, hinting at what might happen on a larger time scale when we get to Mars.

Allegra Rosenberg wrote about the rise of “Normie Fandom” as it relates to Barbenheimer and Taylor Swift.

This great piece about Dissociative Identity Disorder and TikTok raises a LOT of (sometimes uncomfortable) questions about mental health. Is it dangerous when an open platform like TikTok raises awareness of little-known disorders that could lead to imitative or incorrect self-diagnosis? Does social media trivialize mental health disorders, or does it make it easier to empathize? And does a platform like TikTok have the power to evolve the manifestation of conditions like DID?

Upcoming Topics

A quick preview of some thoughts that are coming together for future posts… If you have any thoughts on any of these topics I’d love to know what you think!

·      Analyzing the booming romance industry and related trends

·      The mainstreaming of vice (ESPN gets into gambling, Dunkin’ makes alcohol, etc)

·      Something about digital identity related to the French Revolution

·      Prediction: When (and how) the “Streaming Wars” will end

·      An Elegy for a Starcruiser