Without insights, your creativity is blind: Mindscapes

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In the second session of the day to focus on insights, Yonathan Dominitz, founder at Mindscapes, presented a number of award-winning campaigns and explained the insights behind them.

“There is a lot of confusion about what an insight is,” said Dominitz. “Without insights your creativity is blind.”

Dominitz shared the methodology adopted by Mindscapes for revealing meaningful insights and emphasised his idea that it's a “chain of revelations” and not a singular finding.

According to Dominitz, revealing an insight that will inform a creative campaign can be broken down into a three-stage process:

• Observation: A truth about how things are.
• Understanding: Revealing a new understanding or meaning within the brand context.
• Articulation: Presenting a new perspective about the brand.

He went on to apply the idea to a number of campaigns for brands including Snickers, Puma and Australia’s V/Line train operator.

Australia's V/Line Guilt Trips campaign.

Another key message from the forum was the idea of searching for conflicts when exploring insights. “Search for a conflict,” said Dominitz.  “When people experience conflicts, they experience tension and discomfort and they search for new solutions.”

In conclusion, Dominitz uged the audience to move away from the perspective of looking for insights with products and to “focus on people.”

Campaign’s observations: Despite being late in the day, this was by far the most packed forum of day two, with the audience spilling out of the door. When Dominitz ran out of time and explained that he was obliged to open the floor for questions, one audience member jumped up to ask: “I think I speak for everyone here, but can you please finish the presentation?”

You can request slides from this presentation by emailing: [email protected]