Every Move You Make

Ogilvy's research confirmed that the archetypal Miller drinker felt more comfortable expressing affection for friends than did the Bud Lite boys. "We felt the Bud guys were much more about impressing each other," Bick says. "The problem was, how do we convey that without completely going off the edge? We didn't want a campaign that got all sanctimonious. It's a beer ad."

Enter the Ogilvy creative team, which riffed on their own experience in bars. The result was a hilarious series of ads that cut from a Miller Lite drinker's weird experiences in the world--getting caught in the subway taking money from a blind musician's guitar case, or hitching a ride in the desert with a deranged trucker--to shots of him regaling friends with tales over a brew.

Steve Hayden, Ogilvy's vice chairman and worldwide creative director, said the real-life video helped the team get the details just right. "In advertising, one of the hardest things to do is to re-create a world, from behavior to real human cadences and tones. The tape showed us, for example, that these guys don't speak in neat sentences or well-outlined paragraphs. It let us bring a level of verisimilitude to the execution that was just terrific."

That's just what Gray had in mind when he hired Gilding back in 1999. At the time, he was looking for a way to beef up the agency's strategic capabilities and sharpen its creative output. Gilding, whose background was in cultural analysis, was consulting on marketing and producing documentary films in Leeds. She cold-called Tro Piliguian, Ogilvy's North America CEO, and managed to talk her way into a meeting in New York. The result? A job offer, and an edit room that was in a closet that still reeked of the art department's adhesive spray.

In 2000, Gilding was joined by Shapira, 38, a Canadian strategy specialist who had worked for J. Walter Thompson in Bangkok. Her interest in ethnography was piqued while researching shampoo among village women. The client thought the product's natural ingredients would be its selling point. But villagers told Shapira they wanted glitz. Science! Plastic! "I learned that if you really want to know what's going on around you, you just have to shut up and listen," she says.

The two, who finish each other's sentences and are partial to ad agency black, admit their relationship can be contentious. "We think very differently, so we often battle things out from different points of view," Gilding says. "But ultimately, we have the same relationship to the data, which is one of ethical responsibility." Their team now includes six full-time producers and researchers, and a phalanx of consulting anthropologists and psychologists, who are matched with clients by specialty. The group has moved from its original closet to a room at Ogilvy's Manhattan headquarters filled with computers and video equipment.

Ogilvy isn't the only company to discover the methodology. Young & Rubicam, Saatchi & Saatchi, J. Walter Thompson, TBWA\Chiat\Day, and a raft of independent consultants all have used ethnographic research, as have companies ranging from Microsoft to MTV. In fact, Gilding's sort of analysis has been in and out of favor among marketing researchers since the 1930s, according to Kellogg School of Management marketing professor John Sherry. Most recently, such methods had been shunted aside in favor of more quantitative techniques. But now, Sherry believes, they've regained credence as advertisers have become more interested in brands' affective qualities. "Most marketers have traditionally had an engineering or product-oriented perspective," he says. "But with all the talk about the 'experience economy,' they're starting to pay attention, because here's a methodology that prizes it."

Interest in this technique has also grown as frustration mounts with the limitations of more conventional research tools like focus groups and surveys. "A focus group is a like a chain saw," says Americus Reed II, a marketing professor at the Wharton School of Business. "If you know what you're doing, it's very useful and effective. If you don't, you could lose a limb." Group opinion can be swayed by more vocal and strident members, he says, and findings can be skewed by participants' reluctance to share their true feelings in front of a group.

Ethnographic research overcomes some of those limitations by its duration and sometimes extraordinary intimacy. Shapira cites one study for Depend incontinence products that focused on women. On the tape, a woman in her bedroom confesses to the videographer that she's never asked her husband how he feels about her condition. "Maybe I don't want to hear the answer to that," she says.