Andrew Wiseman looks at the continued rise of data, and the implications for creativity in research.
I was reading the BBC Sport website earlier today, and my eye was drawn to an article entitled ‘The slow death of the screamer’. The article looks back whimsically at December 2006’s ‘Goal of the Month’ compilation from Match of the Day, and laments the emergence of data as a key reason why fewer ‘screamers’ (typically goals scored from outside the penalty area) are now scored.
As a keen observer of the data explosion in football, especially the emergence of xG (Expected Goals), we shouldn’t be surprised that data-driven football is providing fewer moments of creative brilliance. After all, the very ‘specialness’ of the screamer is that they don’t happen very often, and a given player might only effectively execute the skill on rare occasions.
But should the advance of data necessarily reduce creativity? Certainly, in the world of research and analytics, the two need to continue to co-exist. As an industry, we’ve banged on for years about the need to move from data to insight, and yet, we’ve all sat through one of those terminally boring brand tracker or NPS debriefs, haven’t we?
So how do we bridge the gap? Sure, data visualization has come a long way, and there’s really no longer any reason to show data as a continual stream of bar or pie charts, but creativity has to extend beyond your latest chart deck in PowerPoint or Canva. Using data creatively means cutting through the complexity. In our experience, there’s a number of ways to achieve this:
- Using the broad range of gen-AI tools to discover nuanced insights from the data, especially when that data is unstructured;
- Developing and deploying analytical and modelling approaches to discover connections and dependencies between different data series;
- Using hypothesis led storytelling, to focus on the data that matters, and focusing on the ‘so what’ and ‘now what’ from those data points
- Triangulating your research data with other data that is available to develop stronger and richer stories from your data.
By following these steps, you bring your data story to life in a creative way, one that goes beyond the boring old reportage we’ve all been exposed to. Now, don’t get me wrong, you might not get a John Motson style response to your debrief that a Tony Yeboah 30 yarder might get, but you’ll certainly make much more of a difference to your client’s business. And this can only be a good thing.
Andrew is Strategy Director at Mustard, and a Bolton Wanderers season ticket holder. When writing this blog he was, of course, channelling his inner Jay Jay Okocha.