End Insight Famine: Power Creativity With Depth.
Without Deep Insights, Creativity Stays Shallow and Growth Stalls.
Why Insight Famine Weakens Creative Effectiveness
The State of Creativity 2025 identifies one of the most dangerous blind spots in modern marketing: the insight famine. Despite an explosion of consumer data, most brands fail to translate it into the kind of insights that power brave creativity and business growth.
The numbers tell the story. A majority, 51% of companies, rate their ability to develop high-quality insights as poor or very poor, while only 13% call it excellent. This is not a marginal weakness; it is a systemic capability gap. Even worse, there is a perception gulf. 26% of brands believe their insight capability is strong, but only 10% of agencies agree.
This disconnect has serious consequences. Without strong insights, marketers lack confidence. Without confidence, they avoid creative risk. As a result, safe, shallow campaigns dominate, work that looks competent on the surface but fails to build memory, salience, or sales.
By contrast, when brands prioritize structured insight, boldness follows. WARC’s Culture of Creative Effectiveness (2024) shows that companies with systematic insight processes are 3.4x more likely to take creative risks. Gallup’s research reinforces the point: insight-driven organizations outperform peers by 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margin.
Creativity without insight is guesswork. Insight without depth is noise. To end the famine, leaders must treat insight as strategic infrastructure.
Observation Is Not Insight
One of the most corrosive habits in marketing today is equating surface-level data with genuine human insight. As strategist Matt Klein argues: “The biggest lie in marketing today is that data equals insight.”.
Observation is noticing what consumers do.
Insight is understanding why they do it, and what emotional or cultural levers could change behavior.
The danger of confusing the two is that brands end up executing campaigns that describe behavior but fail to reframe it.
The Specsavers “Misheard Version” campaign demonstrates the difference. At first glance, the problem was clear: Britons weren’t booking hearing tests. A surface observation would have yielded generic campaigns about health benefits. But deeper investigation uncovered a taboo: consumers associated hearing loss with death. This stigma made the subject socially unmentionable.
By reframing the issue around “mishearing” , an experience that sparks laughter and connection, Specsavers shifted the conversation entirely. The campaign didn’t just reduce fear; it made hearing tests part of a positive social narrative. The results: bookings rose 1,220% above target, and the campaign won the 2024 Grand Prix in Audio & Radio Lions.
This case proves the central point: observation without revelation produces safe ads; true insights unlock transformative creativity.
Collaboration Creates Better Inputs
The report also makes clear that insight is not a solo activity, it thrives on partnership. Survey results show that the stronger the brand–agency relationship, the stronger the brand rates its own insight capability.
This is why leading partnerships go beyond transactional briefs. They co-invest in understanding each other’s worlds, building a shared insight base that produces braver creative.
Consider Mars Petcare and Colenso BBDO. Together they created Fetch, a recurring magazine dedicated to uncovering quirky, surprising pet insights. That obsession with context yielded the Whiskas “Meowzers” campaign in 2024. Facing a rise in shelter dog returns due to owner burnout, the team reframed cats as “fuss-free dogs.” By intercepting dog adoption searches with the “Meowzers” positioning, Whiskas drove a 27% increase in cat adoptions.
This success wasn’t luck, it was the product of agency immersion, brand openness, and shared investment. Collaboration multiplies insight, and insight multiplies creative effectiveness.
Diversity and Depth Prevent Bias
Why does the insight famine persist? The report identifies three main barriers:
Lack of clarity on what defines a high-quality insight (18% brands, 29% agencies).
Low prioritization of insight development (7% brands, 14% agencies).
Insufficient time allocated for exploration (18% brands, 12% agencies).
These failures often push marketers back onto instinct, bias, or personal preference. As one brand leader admitted, scarce insight resources “can lead to decisions based on personal taste rather than consumer reality”.
The solution is diversity, of methods, perspectives, and people. Mark Ritson urged Cannes Lions 2024 delegates to “do a 180” and see the world from the consumer’s point of view. DEI strategist Andrés Ordóñez added in “If our insights and strategies start from diversity, we can have better output.”.
The IKEA example proves the payoff of depth. Its annual Life at Home study surveys 37,000 people across 37 countries, immersing teams in the realities of domestic life. In Norway, research revealed that 48% of people felt disconnected from idealized media portrayals of home. The 2024 print campaign “Life Is Not an IKEA Catalogue” turned that truth into action, celebrating imperfect homes and driving online and in-store traffic to record highs.
The lesson: when insights are shallow, creative is safe; when insights are diverse and deep, creative is brave.
AI: Amplifier, Not Replacement
The report highlights another tension: the sheer scale of available data. IBM estimates that 90% of the world’s data has been generated in the last two years. Marketers are overwhelmed. AI offers speed, but not salvation.
Used well, AI can accelerate discovery. According to WARC, synthetic data can replicate survey results with up to 95% accuracy. Agencies like McCann are already using AI for predictive modeling and cultural scrapes. As Harjot Singh, McCann’s Global CSO, notes: “We are using AI in the discovery part of the creative process. We are using it to do predictive modelling and quick cultural scrapes.”.
But synthetic research is not a panacea. A 2024 study by Siberia and The James Beard Foundation found that synthetic data often misses subtle human behaviors, emotional nuance, and cultural meaning. When over-relied upon, it risks dictating creative direction rather than informing it.
The imperative is balance: AI should amplify human expertise, not replace it. The best insights still come from conversations, observations, and cultural immersion. Data without humanity produces safe campaigns. Data interpreted through human depth produces bold, effective ones.
Recommendations: CEO-Level Imperatives
Brands must stop treating insight as a side project and start running it like core infrastructure. Here are the non-negotiables:
Outlaw “Data = Insight” Thinking: Data dashboards are not insights. CEOs must demand diagnostic rigor, training marketers to move beyond surface observations. As strategist Matt Klein noted: “The biggest lie in marketing today is that data equals insight.”Leaders must enforce the standard that every campaign begins with a human truth, not just a statistic.
Invest in Diagnostic Depth: Insight development is too often underfunded, only 7% of brands admit they prioritize it. CEOs must treat insight budgets as growth budgets. Ring-fence resources and time for structured exploration, ensuring teams go beyond shallow category clichés.
Demand Brand–Agency Co-Investment
The strongest insights emerge when agencies and clients invest in each other’s context. Mars Petcare and Colenso BBDO’s “Meowzers” campaign proved the value: by reframing shelter cats as “fuss-free dogs,” they achieved a 27% lift in adoptions. Boards should demand evidence of true collaboration, not transactional supplier relationships.Institutionalize Mixed Methods: CEOs must break their organizations’ reliance on one-dimensional surveys or real-time dashboards. IKEA’s Life at Home study ( 37,000 people, 37 countries) provides an annual truth-base for its creative. Institutionalizing mixed-method research (quant + qual + cultural immersion) ensures campaigns reflect reality, not bias.
Deploy AI as Amplifier, Not Dictator
AI can replicate survey results with up to 95% accuracy, but synthetic data misses nuance. Leaders must mandate that AI supports scale and speed, while final interpretation remains human. Automation should never dictate creative direction.
These imperatives are not optional. Without them, brands remain blind, slow, and timid. With them, leaders build the insight infrastructure that makes bold creativity inevitable.
Bottom Line: Insight Poverty Is Growth Poverty
The State of Creativity 2025 shows that 51% of companies admit they are weak at developing insights. That weakness directly explains why most advertising plays safe, misses cultural opportunities, and delivers flat returns. Shallow insights lead to shallow creative; shallow creative forces brands to overspend on media just to stand still.
In financial terms, this is not inefficiency, it is a competitive handicap. Brands that fail to end the insight famine will be trapped in a cycle of timid work and wasted budgets. Competitors with structured insight systems will compound advantage, taking bigger risks, achieving stronger growth, and dominating consumer memory.
Insight-poor brands will bleed market share to insight-rich rivals, not because they spend less, but because they think less.
