PERCEPTION REALITY
IMPERFECT VISION
Perception is always imperfect. It’s influenced by our biases, our personal experiences and also by what we know. To quote from The Atlantic’s recent interview with Villanova psychologist Tom Toppino: “… perception is not the result of simply processing stimulus cues. It also importantly involves fitting prior knowledge to the current situation to create a meaningful interpretation.” This is why, when someone mentions the presence of an optical illusion in an image, we can’t unsee it. Once the information has been fed into our brains, it indefinitely changes the way a picture looks.
With this in mind, the individuals with the best-informed perceptions on marketers and their brands are those who work alongside them every day: their agency partners. In assembling the views of 40 creative and media agency executives, our aim was to follow up from our earlier Agency Perceptions issue and offer an informed collection of views from the other side.
We again worked closely with the talented team of creative data geeks at TRA to give readers a glimpse inside some of the brightest minds. And again, we’ve kept things anonymous to give the participants the opportunity to speak freely without the fear of a retributive horse head ending up in the agency minibar.
The point here is not to blindly criticise marketers and the work they put in on a daily
