Closing the gap between insight and decision: Lessons from TikTok
With TikTok’s Head of Product Marketing Strategy & Comms, EU and Israel, Callum Smith and Bounce’s Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Charlie Butler.
Attribution is a fundamental challenge for many insights teams. Despite the output being invaluable and a huge contributing factor to the business outcome, the link between that insight and the decision it drives is often invisible.
For Callum Smith, Head of Product Marketing Strategy & Comms, EU and Israel at TikTok, this is driven by three things - what he calls the 3V framework - velocity, visibility and vividness. How can insights teams close the gap between business questions and answers? How can they make their voice more heard across the business? How can they help teams get to the single most valuable insight?
Callum took to the stage at Quirk’s New York, alongside our Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Charlie Butler, to share what he’s learnt from some of the best researchers he’s worked with and what his vision is for the connection between commercial and insights teams. Here’s a recap.
“You’re left with three imperfect solutions to choose from”
“Most talks at insights events over the last 6-12 months have been about efficiency. About doing more with less, which is a huge challenge for a lot of teams right now. But today we want to talk about attribution. About proving the value of insights. How do you show that good research leads to good decisions, which lead to good growth?” asks Charlie.
“Before we jump into that, I want to start with the problem. How did we get here? For some time, insight leaders have been left with three imperfect solutions to choose from when working with a vendor.”
“First, you have full-service agencies. Exceptional businesses that have some of the best researchers in the world in-house. But they have no core competency in tech, so when you require something fast and cheap, you’re forced to go elsewhere.”
“Next, you have DIY software tools. 10-20 years in the industry and there are some great solutions out there that are both fast and cheap. But the reality is that the complexity required for most research projects - the depth, the nuance - simply isn’t possible with these tools.”
“Finally, you have AI companies. The Claudes, the ChatGPTs, the Geminis of the world. Many of them are standing up on stage today to tell you they’re going to replace researchers. Yet, they have no research context, so the outputs are often irrelevant or inaccurate.”
“What this has created is fragmentation. It’s not just inefficient, it’s increased the number of layers between the business question asked by someone like Callum and the answer” Charlie adds.
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“Five months down the road, I have a different question entirely”
“I want to start by saying I feel the fear of AI as much as any of you," Callum shares. "As a marketer, there’s a real threat there and we’d be stupid to ignore it. The analogy I always think of is going to a party with really close friends and there’s someone there you don’t know, but everyone seems to love them. They’re gregarious, they’re vibrant, they’re a bit loud and obnoxious, and you feel threatened. You think: "Am I going to be best friends with them or are they going to be my worst enemy?" That’s how I feel about AI.”
“We can go down either of those routes, but in both marketing and research, I think there’s real potential there to make AI our best friend. There are three things I think the best researchers I’ve ever worked with embody - the 3Vs framework - and AI can help us achieve these things”.
“First, velocity. Historically, I’ve gone to a fantastic research team - really fantastic - and I’ve said: “I’ve got this problem. I need to understand it and quantify it.” and they’d go, “Yeah, great. I really get this and we can help”. They’d go away to work with vendors and it would take four to five months to get a response, through no fault of their own. But by the time I get to five months down the road, the question I have is entirely different and the insight they worked hard for is no longer valid.”
“How do we close the gap between the business question and the answer?” Callum asked.
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"Many research teams are invisible, criminally so"
“Second is visibility. Many research teams are invisible within a business, criminally so. You're all curious, incredible people with so much value to bring. How do we get you better visibility? How do we make your voice a voice of reason, of insight, of value? Your voice is invaluable to growth, so we need to bring it to the table.” Callum adds.
“The third thing is vividness. This is about the stickiness of the information you create in the mind of the business. Commercial teams, for example, are like a really greedy person at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Their eyes are bigger than their stomachs and they try to gather as many insights as possible. Piling them onto their plate and inevitably, only eating a fraction of them. My experience when I’ve run research teams, sales teams or commercial teams is that they ask for the world, when what they really need is a nugget. How can you help them get to the single nugget that is going to unlock the most value for the business?”.
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"Great insights are like church bells"
“Great insights are like church bells, not wallpaper. When I work with research teams, we think about: “How can we uncover that insight that is going to really unlock the business?”, “How can we make it super salient in the minds of our leadership teams?", "How can we help them make big business decisions as quickly as possible, but also give you the visibility you deserve?" The attribution you should receive for the work you’ve done in shaping the future of the business.” says Callum.
"What has software got right and wrong in the insights industry?"
“If we take a step back for a moment, what is the role of market research? It’s to seek a deeper understanding of the people we’re trying to provide a product or service to. What’s the role of software in any industry? It’s the unrelenting pursuit to deliver on a vision faster, better and cheaper.” shares Charlie.
“Where has software done that well in the insights industry and where has it not? Starting with where it’s done it well, look at companies like Qualtrics. Structured software tools that build repeatability and scalability without damaging quality.”
“But why do full-service agencies still dominate almost all of the revenue in our industry? It’s because almost every piece of research is custom, complex and emotional.”
“Software pursued faster, better, cheaper, but it only succeeded where you could put rigidity around research. This is a really important distinction as we look to the future. Because there’s a huge difference between what software was and what it is becoming. It can now handle complexity, it can handle context and it can curate a solution based on a business question,” Charlie adds.
“Regardless, there are three things I don’t believe will change:
1. Technology is still going to try and take jobs, because it’s going to get faster, better and cheaper, no matter what we do.
2. People are always the architects of change. Technology might be a vessel that enables it, but every change will still be decided, curated and orchestrated by a person.
3. A decision backed by insight will always win."
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"I want researchers that draw fewer dots, but more lines"
“With a lot of things becoming faster and cheaper, volume is becoming easy to achieve with minimal upfront investment. But that begs the question: what is the value proposition? What’s the interesting part? It’s become taste. It’s become judgement.” says Callum.
“What I want in an ideal solution is velocity and speed, but also crucial experience and judgement that only human beings can bring. Better understanding of non-obvious, natural contexts that AI tools simply don’t have.”
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“I want researchers who don’t draw more dots. I want researchers who draw lines between dots, between patterns in the business that I’m not aware of or haven’t realised. The best researchers I’ve worked with consistently have the same characteristic: curiosity, and it's their single greatest superpower.”
“But it could be better put to force by really understanding what’s happening in the business you operate in.”
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What is Bounce's Insights Operating System?
The Insights Operating System exists for insights leaders like Callum, who need velocity and speed, but also want judgement and guidance that only experienced researchers could deliver.
It’s for insights leaders who use full-service agencies for large, in-depth studies, but also need a flexible solution to help them stay agile throughout the rest of the year.
In short, the Insights Operating System has two parts. First is the Retrieval Engine. Studies show that over a third of all the research done at an enterprise level is duplicative - a huge waste of budget and effort. The Retrieval Engine unifies all of your past research and enables you to ask questions of it in plain text to see if the answer you need already exists. No need to dig through slides, scan datasheets or rely on your memory.
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“Knowledge management, like many DIY tools, failed, because it was like a Google Search for your information. It would simply tell you which of your reports mentioned ‘drinkers in Mexico’. But it didn’t give you the actual answer.”
“Only recently has it been possible to ingest structured and unstructured data and auto-tag it. We can integrate into your central data infrastructure and understand the context [behind your question], so instead of telling you where the answer might be, we can give you the answer.”
For the questions your past research can’t answer, the Insights Operating System runs a gap analysis and builds a custom study using the Research Engine, which is run and delivered at speed by your dedicated Bounce consultants.
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“One of the critical components for an operating system is that it can be independent. For a lot of our clients, we’ll tell them the gaps in their knowledge and they’ll go off and run the research with a different partner.”
“We’re not saying we can do absolutely everything. When speed is important and the need is quant, we will design a survey ready to go live for you in a matter of hours. But if you need deep qual, you can take the brief and take it straight to your qual partner. You may not need to run any research at all, you may need to buy Nielsen data. The point here is independence. The clarity of what you know and what you don’t know.”
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