The question is no longer whether organizations can generate insight….The question is whether that insight survives long enough to shape action.

For much of modern marketing history, strategy and research moved together. Brands invested in understanding people, used that understanding to decide where to play and how to show up, and translated those decisions into action. The path from insight to execution was imperfect, but it was coherent. Ideas moved from mind to hand without losing their shape.

That coherence has gradually eroded.

As marketing became more digital, more specialized, and more programmatic, the distance between thinking and doing widened. Each new layer of tooling promised efficiency, reach, or precision. And it delivered. Messages could be launched faster, audiences could be refined endlessly, and performance could be monitored in real time.

What no one fully anticipated was the tradeoff.

It has never been easier to get a message into the world. It has never been harder to make that message relevant to the right people.

When relevance thins out

You see this play out in subtle ways. A team invests months in research and emerges with a clear picture of who matters and why. The insights are thoughtful, the strategy sound. Weeks later, a campaign brief arrives. The audiences look familiar, but flatter. The nuance has been replaced with attributes, lookalikes, and assumptions that travel more easily through systems. No one made a mistake. The insight simply passed through too many hands, tools, and translations without protection.

The campaign performs. It just does not resonate. So the team optimizes.

Scale without connection

This pattern repeats itself across categories. A mid-market brand with a loyal following faces slower growth as the market becomes noisier. The response is to increase activity. Budgets shift toward performance channels. Programmatic becomes the engine. Visibility improves, but connection does not. Internally, the organization stays busy. Externally, the brand blends in.

Again, the system works as designed. It delivers messages efficiently. What it does not do is preserve meaning.

What broke was not research, but continuity

This moment is often framed as a failure of research or a reason to move beyond it. That misses the point. Research did not fail. Strategy did not fail. What failed was the connection between understanding and execution.

As workflows fragmented, insight moved upstream and activation downstream. In between, relevance thinned into proxies and performance metrics that were easier to scale but harder to feel. Optimization filled the gap. It became the language teams shared because it was measurable and immediate. But optimization cannot create relevance. It can only respond to its absence.

Relevance cannot be optimized into existence.

Relevance is not a moment. It is a system.

The deeper mistake is treating relevance as something you discover once and then hand off. In reality, relevance is fragile. It erodes as ideas move through systems not designed to carry meaning forward. If understanding does not remain present as planning turns into activation, it disappears.

This is the shift now confronting the insights world.

The question is no longer whether organizations can generate insight. They can. The question is whether that insight survives long enough to shape action.

That requires treating relevance as a system rather than a deliverable. A system that keeps strategy, research, planning, and execution connected. One that shortens the distance between mind and hand so that speed does not come at the expense of meaning.

Why this matters now

In an attention-constrained world, the brands that win will not be the loudest or the fastest. They will be the ones that remain coherent as they scale, ensuring that what they know about people continues to guide what they do in the market.

This is the problem space we are spending our time in at Big Village as we evolve our role in the insights ecosystem. Not replacing research, and not chasing tactics, but working to reconnect understanding and action in a way that holds up under modern marketing conditions.

This series is an open exploration of that shift. A chance to think out loud, test ideas, and learn alongside others navigating the same terrain.