Why do I keep saying Human-led. Data-Driven.? And what does it actually mean?

Hello Hello,

You will see it plasterd everywhere on my stuff, and it emerged as the distillation of my approach to strategising and decision-making in marketing for the arts.

After doing talks on data and the importance of it (especially with owning your own data), my reputaion started being more into the 'data nerd' category, which, if you have ever been to any of my extremely loud experimental theatre shows that I did the music for, probably doesn't quite fit with the reality.

Data is inherently historical and can't always capture the 'now'; for example, right now, a contextual thing would be to include spelling mistakes in your copy (have you spotted my two above ^^), so your writing doesn't look like it's from AI. Because AI is ‘low effort' and everyone can (and does) use it, the cognitive bias that stems from this is to devalue due to lack of effort, and so if you smell the whiff of our good friend Claude or ChatGPT, you switch off and stop reading.

BUT TECHNICALLY, those captions are fine, probably clearer than what I write in my own voice, and the data will likely say ‘good job’. It’s not the actual words that matter, though; it's the stuff around those words (rhetoric time). And that is sometimes hard to take into account when you aren’t thinking about the people at the end and are stuck in the data.

Human-led, data-driven basically means start with remembering we are dealing with people, then work backwards. Then, you must measure the impact of things as closely as you can with the correct data infrastructure so you can feel confident with testing different approaches and continue to learn what is working.

Hope that clears things up, but if not, always more than happy to chat about it. I’ll be writing a longer form piece on it soon.