Drowning in data but starved of wisdom

Warns against uncritical use of data and advises that marketers should champion insight to bring its wisdom to the boardroom.

Is all your data driving brand advantage? Marketers should demand more from their data intelligence by championing the role of insight to drive its wisdom into the boardroom, says Sue Elms.

Last year, Arianna Huffington looked at the rise of Big Data, algorithms and AI, concluding that, as access to intelligence has gone up, our collective wisdom as a society has gone down. A tsunami of information has muddied the true with the fake, fostering hype and false reality, division and polarisation. "We are drowning in intelligence but starved for wisdom," she wrote.

The advertising world is also drowning in...

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands