A 45-second reminder of what we are losing

A father and daughter, both pilots, happened to be sitting in two different aircrafts at Washington Dulles International Airport on the 1^st of September, waiting for take-off clearance. The daughter recognised the voice on the radio. “Is that Dad?” “Daddy.”

What followed was an entirely unscripted, utterly ordinary 45-second conversation. They discovered they were both waiting to take off, wished each other safe flights and exchanged a few words.

Then the curious air traffic controller joined in. “Are you proud that your daughter is a pilot?” “To some extent,” the father replied. The ATC laughed and asked whether she was still living at home. “No,” came the answer. “But she’s still on the family cell phone plan.”

The exchange went viral under the wonderfully appropriate title: Forever Family Phone Plan.  I loved this amazing human story. Not only because it was a beautiful father-daughter moment, but it reminded me of something we seem to be losing in business, the value of an actual conversation.

When I used to run agencies, I  discouraged clients from sending us elaborate written briefs. I wanted face time. I didn’t dislike briefs, but I flet the best insights rarely arrive neatly formatted under headings such as “Consumer Insight”, “Target Audience” and “Communication Objective”, all creating a literal, closed loop funnel for thinking.

The brief was never the brief. Insights emerge in conversation. Someone says something that wasn’t in the brief. You ask a question. They hesitate. You probe a little more. And suddenly you discover the real problem. That is where strategy often begins.

We also spent time going into markets ourselves to understand how media was actually being consumed. We didn’t want to simply extrapolate from research numbers and build a media plan around a spreadsheet. We wanted to see people, listen to them and understand their lives. Those insights were always richer than anything the research report could tell us.

Somewhere along the way, the dashboard took over and surprisingly the irony is that we now have more data than ever before. We can measure everything. Reach, frequency,  engagement, viewability, attribution, conversion, cost per acquisition,  return on ad spend. But, the fact is we seem to understand less.

The entire brand-customer connect ecosystem today lives inside computer hard drives. Media plans emerge from screens. Optimisation happens through algorithms. Recommendations are generated by platforms. Dashboards glow with numbers. In all of this, one ingredient that has quietly disappeared is Judgement.

I’m reminded of an incident when I was advising an AdTech optimisation platform. I came across a media plan for a sugar-free ice cream brand. The targeting included bodybuilders. There’s nothing technically wrong with that.  But I couldn’t help asking Why? Was there an actual consumer insight behind it? Was there a behavioural reason? The answer was, an audience segment was available on the platform.  The technology could execute the targeting beautifully. But technology wasn’t going to question the premise. A human being had to.

I encountered something similar while advising a regional media house. A large media agency had effectively decided what rate the publication should operate at because that was the rate they had already quoted a client to win a pitch.

The logic was backwards. The number existed first. The commercial reality had to somehow fit around it. I refused to simply accept that pressure. Instead, I got the client into the conversation and asked two fairly simple questions, If you approach media owners by arm-twisting them on price you and/or your agency pre decided without a conversation with them,  how will you ever expect them to go the extra mile for your brand when you need a favour? And, two, when customers come to buy your brand with pre decided pricing, will you sell?

Media is not always a transaction. Sometimes you need a media owner to think with you, to open a door, to create something special, to solve a problem that wasn’t anticipated in the media plan. That relationship cannot be optimised into existence. It has to be built only through meaningful conversations.

The fear of losing the business isn’t only a problem on the agency side. Media owners are equally caught in this trap. Many are afraid to challenge an agency or a client because they fear losing the business. So they give the client what they think the client wants. Agencies are afraid to challenge the brief because they fear losing the pitch. Platforms optimise what can be measured. Clients ask for accountability. Everyone wants certainty and everyone is busy filling the dashboard. The result can be a strange paradox, an industry with unprecedented amounts of information but too little conversation and real understanding.

Data is not the enemy. None of this is an argument against technology. Data, technology, automation and AI can make us dramatically better at what we do. They can process more information than any human can. They can identify patterns we will miss. They can optimise campaigns at a scale that was unimaginable when I started out. But they cannot replace the human instinct to stop and ask, Does this really make sense? That conversation is more valuable than another decimal point of optimisation.

Data can only tell us what happened. It can tell us what people clicked, watched, bought or ignored. But conversation helps us understand why. The “why” actually changes everything.

The competitive advantage is becoming human again.  The father and daughter at Dulles weren’t trying to create a viral moment. They weren’t optimising engagement. There was no dashboard. No KPI. No campaign objective. Just two people recognising each other’s voices and taking 45 seconds to connect.

That is the lesson. In a world designed around efficiency, automation and optimisation, the ability to have an unstructured, curious, human conversation will itself become a competitive advantage.

The best strategy will  not always come from another report. The best media plan will not always come from another algorithm. The best customer insight will not be sitting inside another dataset. Most of the times it is sitting across the table from you.

You just have to talk to them and listen too.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not in any way represent the views of exchange4media.com.