Daniel Fox

I recently read Obvious Adams after hearing it recommended, I think by Rory Sutherland on a YouTube clip. It’s a short story, yet it does a great job of making its point better than many business books ten times its length.

Partly, I think that’s because it transports you to a different era. A time when advertising felt more like a craft than an algorithm. When businesses seemed to believe that serving customers well was simply good business. Success wasn’t followed by self-promotion, or LinkedIn victory posts. The hero of the story quietly observed, noticed what others had missed, solved problems and moved on. There is something strangely refreshing about that.

The central premise of Obvious Adams is beautifully simple. The biggest opportunities are often staring us in the face. They remain invisible because everyone is looking somewhere more complicated.

It is an uncomfortable thought.

Today we have access to more information than any marketer in history could ever have imagined. We can track clicks, engagement, impressions, dwell time, eye movements, purchase history, intent signals, EPOS data, CRM records, website journeys, sentiment analysis and countless dashboards that update by the minute. We know almost everything.

And yet, in many ways, we seem to understand people less.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve confused measurement with understanding.
Data tells us what happened. It is often much less useful at explaining WHY it happened. The average customer still doesn’t wake up thinking about your funnel, your attribution model or your quarterly KPIs. They are simply trying to solve problems, avoid risk, save time, impress their boss, make their partner/spouse or children happy and get through another busy day.

The obvious truths about human behaviour haven’t changed nearly as much as the tools we use to analyse it.

We spend so much time looking at the data that we stop looking at the people.
Perhaps that explains why genuinely obvious ideas still feel surprisingly rare.

The obvious isn’t always easy because it rarely appears sophisticated. It doesn’t usually arrive wrapped in complexity. Sometimes it arrives as an awkward question that nobody thought to ask.
What would the customer actually call this?
Why do people keep ignoring this feature?
Why does every competitor make the same assumption?
What if the real competitor isn’t another brand, but doing nothing at all?
Why are we optimising something customers barely notice while ignoring the thing they complain about every day?

Those questions sound almost too simple.
That’s precisely why they matter.
Obvious Adams suggests that seeing the obvious is a gift. But its a discipline. It requires us to slow down, question assumptions and spend more time observing than presenting.
Perhaps we can train ourselves to notice the obvious a little more often.
Spend time with real customers instead of only reading reports about them.
Ask “why?” a few times before accepting the first explanation.
Read complaints before reading dashboards.
Watch what people actually do rather than relying solely on what they say.
Talk to colleagues who are closest to customers. Salespeople, customer service teams and account managers often notice patterns long before the data catches up.

Occasionally ignore the dashboard altogether and ask yourself one simple question.
“If I knew nothing about this business, what would seem obvious?”
The answer might not always be right.
But every now and then, it will reveal something everyone else has overlooked.

Nearly a century after it was written, Obvious Adams still feels relevant because people haven’t changed nearly as much as we think they have.

Perhaps the next competitive advantage won’t come from collecting more data – Perhaps it will come from seeing what has been there all along.