Sinsight: All businessmen wear suits & ties
So in what I can only assume is some sick joke, I have been asked to speak at an upcoming conference for CEO’s.
Big company CEO’s … not just Bill’s Fish & Chips.
They want me to talk about ‘insights’ … both interms of what they are, where you get them and why they’re useful for business … however because I’m sure the audience will be pretty disengaged listening to some bloke from adland, I thought I’d hire a comedian and get him/her to express my views and thoughts through a stand up performance.
Yep … I’m basically following the principals of Lego, but for boring adults rather than creative kids, haha!
To be honest I haven’t really thought this through – however what I do know is that I want to explain how insights should never be a bland general observation because if that is allowed to happen, we are basically placing an unreasonable over-reliance on the other aspects of business to get the results needed and the chance of failure increases dramatically.
With that in mind, I’d like you to contribute genuine bullshit insights you’ve heard as well as the brand [or category] they were for.
If you want to provide the link to the ads as well, that’s cool … but it’s not necessary … I’m sure they’ll be scary enough without a visual to drive the point home.
To get the ball rolling, here’s one I heard a while back:
“Mum’s love their kids”.
No … that’s not a joke … that was the insight that was supposed to drive both action and differentiation.
I don’t know what’s worse … the fact an agency/planner wrote it or a client accepted it … however that’s nothing compared to this one – where a reason to NOT buy was used as the driving force of a campaign.
Sadly this sort of twatdom is not that uncommon, which is why I want the real powers-that-be to know what’s going on because even though there’s the risk of them wanting to get involved in the whole process, it would at least mean we’re talking/dealing with the person at the top rather than some underling whose main decisions are based on keeping their boss happy rather than moving the business forward.
So ladies and gentlemen – let’s start the insight amnesty [even if you had nothing to do with them] – over to you.