Insights - The lethal weapon for any good communication

Insights kick-off the planning process. It is the insight that determines whether a creative rendition is cutting edge or crap.

Wikipedia says that Insight is the act or result of apprehending the inner nature of things or of seeing intuitively.

An example for an insight

This is something I did sometime ago for a consumer durable major back in India. They wanted to launch a Picture-in-Picture television. I drew the insight from my experience back home. When my mother would want to watch a daily soap on TV, my father would fight her to watch his day-night cricket match.

Hence the insight "People fight over which channel to watch" gave birth to the creative expression which had the proposition "You don’t have to fight for control anymore".

I particularly like the great Jeremy Bullmore's expression of an insight "It is like a refrigerator, the moment you open it a light comes on". I love this analogy of the great man.

Here's some more about what the other planners around the world say about insight…
Russell Davies has some exciting threads about insights in his blog. And here is something from Abu Dhabi.