I said to my wife the other day that if I had been an academic like I set out to be, I likely wouldn't be as well-read or broadly knowledgeable about so many things as I am today. I'd likely be down a rabbit hole without a paddle and mixing metaphors like the mafia mixes cement.
This isn't idle chatter.
There's actually an advertising point.
Something the industry has forgotten.
But back to my catholic style of reading or learning. No, not Catholic as in the Church's co-opting of that word. But catholic, small c, with the word's original meaning. (My father taught me that meaning--and I remember at 15 or 16 questioning him about it. Like me, or me like him, he was among the most active-learners I have ever encountered.)
In any event, I just finished reading a book called "Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology" by Eric H. Cline, the head of the department of Archaeology at George Washington University. It sets out to give lay-dimwits like myself an orientation into archaeology, it's history, development, successes, setbacks, superstars and more.
I chose it because I believe advertising people, like good archaeologists and explorers in general must dig to find facts. Facts ain't found in powerputz (my Slip Mahoney-ism for powerpoint).
Considering that I'm not an archaeologist, and won't even dig in my wife's expansive gardens, I've read a lot of archaeology including two other books by Cline, both of which were from in Yale's "Turning Points in History" series.
As an advertising person, I read archaeology because l am in search of what Bernbach called "simple, timeless human truths." They ain't coming from some business-book pablum. Those universal ideas about humanity come over massive sweeps of time and the perspective gained over time. Getting out of the quotidian stürm und drang lets you see things you can't when you're bailing out seawater to keep from drowning or sinking. Or stinking.
If you're wondering what the big schmear is about 1177 BC in two of Cline's many books, no, it's not the year I was born. It was a period when the civilized world seem to break down. Cities were destroyed, international trade ceased, religions failed, disease was endemic and huge swaths of populations perished. These happenstances had always been attributed to the "Sea People," whose arrival heralded doom. But Cline investigates and brings in other seismic events--like climate change, earthquakes and volcanoes and more. All of which precipitated a butterfly effect of change upon the world.
I started reading about the collapse of everything a couple of decades ago. It seems a proper overture to the opera that's coming.
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But back to the first book I mentioned, Cline's "Three Stones Make a Wall." The title is based on the axiomatic ditty above. And, at long last, is the point of today's post.
What I'm learning from Cline is something I'd never learn if I only read, as so many marketing people do, books about marketing (usually written by people who have never done any real marketing. That is, they've never sold anything.)
In Three Stones, Cline traces the origins of archaeology, from its 16th Century treasure-hunting days at Herculaneum and Pompeii which were buried by the Vesuvian volcanic explosion in 79 CE, through to Schliemann's "discovery" of Priam's Troy, to Carter finding Tut's tomb and riches, to the advancements of the modern day.
All along, archaeologists have been using data. Ancient books, shards popping up through the soil, to word of mouth. Today, archaeology is veritably data-based. Like advertising is allegedly data-based.
What I've learned from Cline, however, is I think in advertising we're doing data wrong.
In advertising, we look at thin slices of data from one or two different perspectives. By then, we've spent all the time we were scoped for and draw our conclusions. We write our insipitude and can claim our advertising was "data-driven," thus justifying the billions our holding-company overlords have spent acquiring so-called data companies. We even give awards for best use of data and we assume that data gives answers rather than instead leading you to smarter questions.
Data to archaeologists is a bug's eye. It's fractal and includes different sorts of data, aerial reconnaissance, ground penetrating radar, Lidar, and various chemical and mineral techniques to locate and date different ground layers. Also used are a dozen or a hundred other techniques. In fact, sixty years ago when a 4000-year-old shipwreck with its cargo virtually in-tact was discovered off of Bodrum, Turkey, archaeologists didn't turn to sonar to find more shipwrecks, they asked area sponge divers. "Been there, dove that."
Data isn't a complete action in time. It's on-going. It's a guide, not an endpoint. Despite all the singers of the singularity, you need people to add up rows of numbers and draw conclusions. You should also never forget that data is a perspective, a way of looking at things. It's maybe not why.
I'm not sure how data really works in advertising. Or if it's just a pseudo-scientific adjunct of what many call "surveillance capitalism," and that it's more about targeting (or stalking) than human behaviors.
BTW, I wrote this ten days ago and the article below I just read in The Economist today. It doesn't exact cement my points (if you can find them) but somehow I think we might be pissing up the same rope. Here are three passages that may underscore my sense of the sense of data.
Some time ago, I read an obituary of the man who founded one of America's approximately 30,000 "dollar" stores. They're discount stores where most everything sells for just a dollar. Someone asked him about his genius in locating the stores in just the right neighborhoods. They had to be downtrodden enough to need a dollar store, yet prosperous enough so people had money to spend. It's a tough needle to thread and this guy apparently did it.
He said, "I looked at strip mall parking lots. If the asphalt had oil stains in the parking places, I knew I had to right place. Rich people's cars don't leak oil. My customers' cars do."
He could have looked at rows and rows of demographic information, household income, employment rates, rise in rents, gentrification or ghettoization.
Instead he looked at oil stains.
That, my friends, is archaeology. It's using data. It's an insight.
In 40 years of advertising, I've heard about three things that smart.
Data isn't a perspective. It's one-hundred. And even then, you're only just getting started. Data is observation and thinking. It's not one source of looking at things--it's many.
We should try it.
I think.
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