Hypothesis-driven insights: facebook.

com/IQ

Using data to inspire

creative briefs
February 2018
Table of contents

Preface
2

Executive summary
3

4 Hypothesis-driven insights

Hypothesis-driven insights: the process

5

Step 1: Understand the client brief

Step 2: Create a hypothesis
Step 3: Extract data points
Step 4: Interpret data points
Step 5: Write a creative brief

Conclusion
13

Facebook IQ | Using data to inspire creative briefs 1

Preface

The importance of relevancy in the effectiveness

of advertising is undisputed — being interesting
to people is key to grabbing their attention,
connecting with a compelling message and
creating value for your brand.

So how do you create advertising that is relevant to

people and lands the most impactful messages, cues
or stories? The answer unsurprisingly lies in
understanding people. Better understanding where
their tensions with a brand, category or product lie,
what their motivators and triggers are, and what they
care about enables and inspires creative ideas
that matter.

There are many approaches to better understanding

people, and there are many ways to discover insights
about them that will trigger powerful ideas. We want
to offer one approach that we have been using
successfully to get from large data to authentic,
idea-fueled insights, and also provide examples of how
we went about it. Our goal with this approach is to
help show how rich data points on people’s behavior
can inspire more impactful, meaningful
and brave creative work.

— Nico Westermann
Global Strategy and Insights Lead,
Facebook Creative Shop

Facebook IQ | Using data to inspire creative briefs 2

Executive summary

30
In the US, users
pick up their phones massive
amounts of
150
Data
billion
to
which
translates mobile and
creates

200 moments
to

times per day

Mobile users in the US pick up their phones 150
to 200 times a day, which makes for 30 billion
mobile moments a day in the US alone.1 This
massive amount of time produces a lot of data,
and we’re beginning to better understand how
this data can be used to drive more successful
marketing and creative campaigns.
A key differentiator of successful businesses in this
mobile world will be how they use data to plan, create
and build smarter and more effective marketing
campaigns. Therefore, no matter what kind of
marketer you may be, better understanding how data
can inform your work will only lead to better results.
CRM data, offline transactions, focus groups and
surveys are just a few examples of the many data
sources available for marketers to analyze for
campaign planning. With all of this available data, the
question becomes: how can marketers better process
and use data to inform their marketing decisions?
At Facebook, we’ve been using the hypothesis-driven
insights approach to transform data into insights.
These insights are used to inspire creative campaigns
that are relevant to audiences and drive real business
results for advertisers.
In this guide, we will dive into hypothesis-driven
insights for creative development, an approach to
analyzing and interpreting data to understand people
in the context of your marketing challenges.
1
Forrester Blog, 2016 Predictions: Key Trends Will Transform
Mobile Engagement , Nov 2015
2
Why Creativity Matters More in the Age of Mobile by Facebook
IQ, March 2017

Facebook IQ | Using data to inspire creative briefs 3

Hypothesis-driven insights

Key advantages:
RESULTS:
• Provides guidance and focus

•
on the data research process
Allows for an efficient and
standardized methodology
1.5x
better ad
of analyzing large data recall
• Is easy to replicate, share and
AND
collaborate on across teams3
• Fits in with a typical
campaign planning process
1.3x
better message
in creative agencies association

when compared
to their respective
vertical and
regional norms

The amount of data generated daily by Hypothesis-driven insights tests people-centric

consumers is staggering, and making sense
of it all can seem daunting. But even if we
could make sense of it all, it still wouldn’t
tell us how to build messages that will
resonate with audiences. People’s
perceptions and behaviors are complex,
and better resonating with them requires
a deeper level of understanding.
3
A Hypothesis-Driven Approach to Social Media Insights’ by Research Live,
Feb 2017.
4
Facebook internal meta-analysis of Brand Lift studies, looking at
380 creatives for Ad Recall and 201 creatives for Message Association
across all verticals and regions (APAC, EMEA, LATAM and NA), from
Jan 2015 to Dec 2017.
hypotheses with audience data, enabling marketers
to gain the confidence to ideate, develop and
execute effective creative. This approach is nothing
new or revolutionary, but integrating it within the
traditional processes of data analysis and creative
development is. It starts with generating hypotheses
on an audience, using data to validate, nuance or
disprove the hypotheses [or a hypothesis] and
finally, using the findings to reveal insights about said
audience that drive creative briefs for ideation.
When applying the hypothesis-driven insights
process to creative development, we’ve seen
that campaigns perform 1.5x better in terms
of ad recall and 1.3x better in terms of message
association compared to its respective vertical
and regional norms.4

Facebook IQ | Using data to inspire creative briefs 4

Hypothesis-driven
insights: the process

The hypothesis-driven insights approach

can be used by anyone that works with data,
from agency planners or strategists to
analysts or researchers.

Depending on how your organization is structured,

you may work with data individually or in a more
collaborative process. For example, you may be a
strategic/account/brand planner that extracts data
from tools at your disposal, you could have access
to a data analyst to help pull and analyze more
complex data, or you might be an analyst/researcher
preparing data points for insights interpretation.
Whatever your role is, we will reference anyone that
works with data in any form as a data practitioner.

Facebook IQ | Using data to inspire creative briefs 5

 ONE
Understand the Client Brief
Align on the problem that needs to be
solved and the people the brand is
interested in reaching.

TWO
Create Hypothesis
Based on prior research and experience
with the brand and audience, create
non-trivial hypotheses of what you and your
team think the insight or tension between
the problem and the people could be.

Hypothesis- THREE

driven insights: Extract Data Points

Obtain data points that have the potential to

the process prove, nuance or disprove your hypothesis.

FOUR
Interpret Data Points
Interpret and discuss the data output, and
determine if you’re proving or disproving your
hypotheses. If proving, give a deeper understanding
to the initial hypothesis. If the hypothesis was
disproven or more data is needed, modify the initial
hypothesis and reiterate on the process.

FIVE
Write Creative Brief
If you and your team are confident that the
insights found are actionable, compile and
summarize your findings into a creative
brief, and use this as a starting point for
ideation with creative teams.

Facebook IQ | Using data to inspire creative briefs 6

Step 1:
Understand the Client Brief
In the first step, clients will share a brief
that contains their business or brand
challenges, desired business outcomes, the
audience that they are interested in marketing
to, timelines and deliverables, and any relevant
existing market research (e.g.: topics, moments
and/or audience behaviors the client has
already researched).
The client and data practitioners will discuss and
probe on the brief until they are both aligned and
clear on the brand/business problem and the key
audience they’re building for.
When it comes to thinking about the business
problem, we recommend stating clearly what the
current challenges are for the brand and crystallize it
into a problem that marketing communication
can solve.
Facebook IQ | Using data to inspire creative briefs
For example:
“Our audience does not have our brand top-of-mind in
moments where they need hydration — we need to
rebuild this connection” or “People don’t know or
perceive our new product as valuable to their lives.
Let’s build a campaign that makes them interested
and increases purchase intent by X%.”
Often, practitioners ask for additional existing
research done by the client to understand what they
already know about the audience. Once clear on the
audience, we have seen it as helpful to gather and
prepare a general overview of who these people are
in terms of demographic, interests and behavior —
which can improve and substantiate your intuition in
the next step of formulating a hypothesis
around them.
7
Step 2:
Create a Hypothesis
Since we are dealing with large datasets,
hypotheses are important guiding mechanisms to
keep us focused on the questions we’re answering.
After we have aligned on the problem and people
in Step 1, practitioners should develop hypotheses
based on existing information that is known about
these people � but also the intuitions built within
their own teams.
The hypothesis is ideally related to social, psychological,
cultural or behavioral tensions between people and the
brand, product, or specific occasions/moments of the
category. Often a hypothesis can start from a “gut”
feeling a data practitioner and their team might have.
This gut feeling can come from many factors including
someone’s previous knowledge, experiences, and/or
existing aggregated industry or demographic data on
the topics.
So what makes a good hypothesis? A focused
hypothesis on what matters to the client, based on the
brief, is key to guiding the project down the right path.
A good hypothesis would be:
“Brazilian soccer fans care more about
the art than the science of the sport. Is
that true and how do they live that love
for the art?”
And a not so good hypothesis would be:
“What do you know about
Brazilian soccer fans?”
Facebook IQ | Using data to inspire creative briefs
The first hypothesis is focused and has a clear, specific
question about what to look for. It also has two distinct
areas of talking about football in “art” and “science”,
which can be tested using data. The second hypothesis
is too broad, can lead us in many different directions,
and does not have a clear way to prove or disprove it.
Yet, in early exploratory situations, it can help map out
an overall view into who the target audience is, what
they are interested in generally, and therefore be a
good starting point when building hypotheses.
Usually hypotheses include at least “who” and
“what”, but it is also good to have “where” and
“when” in them as well.
“For women on the east coast, caring
for their skin becomes an everyday
issue in the winter.”
There are multiple ways to solve marketing problems
with insights, and one rarely knows from the start
which ones can be proven and ultimately become
inspiring and actionable. Therefore, it is good to have
more than one hypothesis to work with. This way, if a
hypothesis leads to nothing interesting, there are other
options to explore and test.
All stakeholders should ideally have a collaborative
session brainstorming hypotheses and aligning on a
final set to test. As an example of this collaborative
session, we have seen that developing these
hypotheses as an interdisciplinary team, especially by
adding the creative team to the discussion, will increase
the quality of the hypotheses. A side benefit of this
approach is that the full working team can check the
hypotheses from their own valuable perspective and
later on have more confidence in working with them.
As the data practitioner goes into extracting data
points, the creative team might start developing
thought starters, thereby testing if the hypotheses do
actually spark interesting ideas.
8
Step 3:
Extract Data Points
Now that we have a succinct set of hypotheses,
we can start preparing a research plan to pull
data to prove or disprove our hypotheses.
When working with large sources of data,
we start our research plan with a set of topic
keywords associated with the hypotheses we
are trying to test. These keywords can be based
on previous research or experiences with the
brand, audience or problem being addressed.
The list can change as this is an iterative process
and we learn more as we run the data.
Facebook IQ | Using data to inspire creative briefs
Your research plan should contain the elements that
you need to start the data pull process. This might
vary depending on the data source, tool and platform
being used. However, the common elements needed
in the research plan are the audience, hypotheses,
data sources and variables that we care about, as well
as filters that you need to narrow the data based on
your hypotheses. Our initial “gut” feeling might be
wrong. We would therefore recommend starting the
research a bit more broad in terms of topic selected
to explore what is out there before narrowing to more
specific keywords.
9
Step 3: Extract data points (continued)

There are several tips that we would like to share in terms of preparing
your research plan and in this case, the exercise of selecting keywords
to extract data.

Noisy data
Tip 1: A key part of any data extraction is keeping noisy data out.
For example, if “serving” is a keyword for food portion related content, we don't want
to match things related to “serving in the army” and “serving my country.” Therefore,
we need to exclude noisy keywords such as “army” and “country” from the analysis.

Tip 2: A good practice is to try to take two vague concepts and combine
them into a single concept. This helps keep things focused and reduces noise.
For example, we can combine data about “food” with “fast.” We suggest using logic
operators such as “AND”, or “OR” among the words. This technique means that we are
looking for the word expression “fast” AND “food” in our example.

Country and/or language level nuances

Tip 3: It is important to understand the context and meaning of words
in each country that we’re looking at to avoid mistakes.
For example, if we are doing a global analysis of the word “beer”, the word itself
means the beverage in English but could also mean the animal bear in Dutch.

Base dataset
Tip 4: To avoid bias, we compare the study data to a base dataset.
We baseline the data by total number of posts or comments or audience size.
For example, when considering data from data about working out, it is important to
distinguish whether women produce the majority of the comments because they talk
about working out more or because they comment more than men in general.
Therefore, make sure that you always have a clear idea of what you are comparing
to help control for other factors.

Facebook IQ | Using data to inspire creative briefs 10

Step 4:
Interpret Data Points
In this step, data practitioners are looking
for meaningful patterns that prove or disprove
their hypotheses. We want to pay special
attention to non-trivial data that reveal in-
sights into why certain audience behave, feel
and think the way they do. At this stage, based
on our identified problem and discussed
hypotheses, we want to see if we have found
a tension we can leverage with advertising
messages to solve the client’s challenge.
Facebook IQ | Using data to inspire creative briefs
It is also a good practice at this point to take a step
back and be cognizant of our own biases about the
audience and the data points that we found before
coming to a conclusion. This can be done through a
discussion with others about the interpretation
behind the data points and how others may
perceive these results.
Once we have aggregated nuance around one or
multiple insights, it’s a useful exercise to discuss their
value in the context of thought starters with the
creative team to prioritize what the insights are that
will fuel the ideas and unlock new ideas. As men-
tioned earlier, this process is iterative. Data points
may or may not prove our initial hypothesis. If it the
latter is true, we can always reiterate on the process
and amend new hypotheses, update the research
plan and pull additional data.
11
Step 5:

Write a Creative Brief

The final product of this process is the creative The brief usually includes, but is not limited to:
brief, a crystallization of our findings in this
process that the full team can agree on. 1. The problem being addressed

2. The people being reached

3. The insight(s)

4. Thought starters that can lead to creative

ideation and development

The goal of the brief is to kick off the creative

development process with a distilled and nuanced
insight that inspires brave, meaningful and effective
ideas for our audience, and eventually leads to a final
creative product.

Facebook IQ | Using data to inspire creative briefs 12

Conclusion

As people become more complex and their mobile habits

continue to evolve, the way we create should follow suit.
Being agile, embracing change and building for new behaviors in brave new ways will differentiate the marketers of
tomorrow from today. And as we continue to explore better ways to use data as a creative muse, the challenge will
be how do we better approach, analyze and interpret large data sets to deliver actionable insights that are relevant
to people and businesses.

Hypothesis-driven insights is one way we can use data to derive actionable insights for planning more successful
campaigns. Hypothesis-driven insights is an attempt to streamline and give structure to our journey navigating
data. More importantly, this approach keeps us focused on answering what we as marketers really care about —
creating impact and driving real business results. We hope data practitioners use this document as a guide to
process large data and as a point of sharing and collaboration across other groups and teams.

Facebook IQ | Using data to inspire creative briefs 13