Ten techniques for digging up a real human truth, an AI that runs them on your brief in a minute, and a one-click Google-grounded research feature that either confirms the insight or politely tells you it is fiction. Exportable to a PPTX before the client meeting.
"If the client reads your insight and nods, it''s a finding. If they pause, it''s an insight."
- Anonymous, pinned on every planner''s wall.
"The consumer wants convenience." "Moms want what''s best for their kids." "Gen Z values authenticity." You have seen these on a slide. I have seen these on a slide. Somebody paid money for these slides.
We should probably talk about that.
An insight is not a sentence that makes the room nod. It''s the sentence that makes the room pause for half a second and go "hang on - that''s a bit rude, but it''s also true." A finding is what you collect. An insight is what you notice. The confusion between the two is responsible for roughly 80% of mediocre advertising and a healthy chunk of the wine bill at any given strategy offsite.
The three tests before you call it an insight
Planners over the decades have left behind a few useful filters. We use three.
The Pause Test. If the reader nods politely, it''s a finding. If they pause and frown slightly like you just said something impolite about their family, it''s an insight.
The Flip Test. Write the opposite of your insight. If the opposite is also a workable brief ("moms want the worst for their kids"?), your original wasn''t pointed enough.
The Bar Silence Test. Say it out loud at a bar. If nobody looks up from their pint, rewrite it.
We traced where these tests came from - Bernbach, Ogilvy, Stephen King, Jon Steel, Mark Earls - in A Short History of Insight. This piece is the part that happens next: how do you actually get one out of a blank page.
The ideation tool: ten techniques, one brief, one minute
Running ten techniques by hand takes a senior planner most of a day. And that''s on a good day, with coffee, without Slack.
We built the Creative Session to do it in roughly the time it takes to boil pasta.
You drop in the brief, the brand, the product, the market. The tool runs the ten techniques in parallel and hands back a grid of insight candidates, each tagged with the technique that produced it. You get to see not just the sentence, but where the sentence came from - "this one is a Category Lie," "this one is a Stolen Moment." That traceability matters, because insights without a technique attached tend to get overwritten by the first loud person in the room.
You can also upload anything that makes the AI smarter: a consumer research PDF, your brand guidelines, a competitor audit, the CMO''s ramble from the kickoff call. It pulls the relevant bits into the prompt.
This is not the "write me an insight" slop you get from a blank chatbot. The techniques do the structural work. The AI does the verbal work. You still do the judging, which is the part you were always paid for.
The one-click research feature
Here is the part that actually changes how strategy work feels.
For any insight in the grid, you hit Research. Behind the scenes, the insight and the brief go to Gemini with Google Search grounding on - which means the model doesn''t riff from its training data, it actually goes and searches the live web, pulls studies, trend reports, cultural signals, news, forums, whatever is relevant right now. Then it comes back with three things:
A grounded write-up of whether the insight holds up in the real world, or whether it was just a cute sentence that felt true.
Live sources. Every claim is linked back to the article, study or post it came from. You can click through.
A verdict on whether this particular insight is a fit for your brand, your product, your brief - and why (or why not).
That last one is the trick. Plenty of insights are beautiful and real and completely wrong for you. A cultural-collision insight about cost of living may be lovely and true and also a terrible fit if your product costs €200 a month. The verdict catches that before you embarrass yourself in the pitch.
Translation: the insight goes from "thing a planner felt on a Tuesday" to "thing a planner can defend to a procurement officer with receipts."
Another click to PPTX, because everyone still lives in decks
Once you''ve picked the winner, hit Export to PPTX. You get a clean deck: the insight, the research summary, the clickable sources, the fit-for-brief verdict. Open it in Keynote or Google Slides, drop it into the strategy section of your pitch, call it a day.
No copy-pasting from a chat window. No reformatting references into footnotes the night before a pitch. No "I had this amazing insight but I can''t remember where I read the supporting data."
The old workflow and the new one
The old insight-to-pitch rhythm: read brief, stare at ceiling, run workshop, spend two days on desk research, write slide, argue with account team, rewrite slide. The new one: paste brief, pick technique, click research, export deck. Same rigour. Roughly one-tenth the Tuesday.
You can try it on your next brief - open a Creative Session. And if you want to see what happens when a sharp insight actually survives all the way into the world, the Pure Insight playlist has twelve of them, from Dove to Snickers to Nike.
Bernbach called it the truth. Ogilvy called it respect. Mark Pollard calls it the thing that makes someone flinch. Whatever you call it - stop stopping at the finding.
