• by Georgina Forster , May 31, 2018

Quick: how many Italian-American MBAs in New York who prefer wine to beer have watched a Facebook video about groundhogs and then within 24 hours also shopped at Nieman Marcus for a cocktail dress?

I bet you anything there’s data to tell us precisely that—and the wind speed outside at the time of purchase. Every click, every view, every user journey is tracked and analyzed. Mysterious patterns and correlations are unearthed. Consumers are better known by data miners and analysts than by their own moms.    

By all rights, marketers should never make another mistake. Never have to risk anything of any substance.  

And that would be a shame. Because risk and surprise go hand in hand, and surprise is powerful.

Did you watch the SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch on February 6? If so, you weren’t alone. The event attracted 2.3 million concurrent views on YouTube, making it the second biggest in YouTube's history. And admit it: part of your viewing experience was the nail biting—you didn't know whether that thing was going to explode on the launch pad. Even Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, didn’t know what was going to happen. Over and over again, he reminded us that the enterprise involved a massive risk: "It's either going to be an exciting success or an exciting failure -- one big boom," he said.

And he was right: it was exciting. No one was more surprised than Elon Musk himself (just watch this video when the Falcon Heavy launch went off without a hitch. As the most powerful operational rocket in the world went up, so did millions of hearts as the possibility of space travel once again burst into our collective imagination. You may have heard cheers coming from a couple of different directions—I did.  Kids everywhere are now daydreaming about the day they will colonize Mars. Risk, it turns out, is fascinating and speaks to something basic in our human nature: the drama inherent in trying.   

I think there’s a message here for brands and their agencies. Risk-adverse, “data’d-up” brands and their agencies may be overlooking something important when they start looking at consumers solely as 360-degree personas. People truly want to be surprised and delighted—for real, not the “delighted by how easy it is to transact on this site” or "surprised by how well this site anticipates my needs" that is the stuff of so many briefs. I’m talking about jaw-dropping, didn’t-see-that-coming amazement.   

The best—if complicated—example I can think of in the last year is the “Fearless Girl” sculpture in lower Manhattan; even the later fall outbrought surprises. State Street Global Advisors and McCann New York quietly installed her in the middle of the night to mark 2017’s International Women’s Day and draw attention to the fact that companies with women on their boards (those supported by State Street’s SHE index fund) are more successful than companies without. Staging the dramatic showdown of a little girl against the huge “Wall Street Bull” is only part of what turned this initiative into more than $7 million in free advertising for State Street.    

Love her or hate her (and there are lots of people on both sides), “Fearless Girl” was magical from the very start because she was a surprise. A risky one, at that: the McCann creative team knew that the installation would either strike exactly the right chord with the public or it would be derided as a preachy stunt. “There wasn’t an A and a B+, there was an A and a massive F," recalls one of the team members. There you have it again: the perceived risk was absolute.

Obviously, I’m not saying that agencies should ignore what their data is telling them. Data analytics lets us devise tactics and strategies that we know (or can reasonably assume) will help clients achieve their business goals. But there’s a difference between a satisfying interactive transaction and an authentic human experience. I suspect that what we don't know—risk—is what separates the two.

I respect the “Fearless Girl” team for embracing risk because they believed—without focus groups, without A/B testing—in the value and the magic of what they were doing, and I’m glad that investors rewarded State Street for backing such a bold vision.  

I wonder sometimes if our reliance on and trust in all the data we can now access stops us from making the bold decisions that might spark authentic surprise, delight and even social change. Why take a chance if there’s always a safer, more knowable, alternative? Then there's the fact that, sometimes, our risks betray us spectacularly, and our connected world is poised to let us know beyond a doubt when we’ve failed (just ask Pepsi and Kendall Jenner).

But when we succeed? The rewards can be stellar.