Didn't See It Coming By Marc Stoiber

Oh, the stories I could tell of pitched battles over idea validation. I've seen the debate swing like a pendulum between test and trust through the years. In the pre-digital days - back when dinosaurs and mad men roamed the savannah - creatives like myself battled researchers over the validity of focus groups and mall intercepts. Usually, we'd be given leeway to trust our intuition on ideas... until a concept bombed. Then, like Dad busting up the keg party, researchers would be brought in to restore a bit of sober adult thinking to the proceedings. Fast forward to the birth of the internet. In the raucous pre-bubble days, we witnessed the rise of dot coms with more investment money than sense. Insane advertising (remember the E*Trade monkey?) made us laugh, but not buy. As the pendulum inevitably swings, so too did the forces of testing. Which brings us to today, where data gathering and testing rule the roost. Kevin Indig caught my eye with a recent Linkedin post, where he took the position that far too