KDDP CE04 - Data & The Big Idea: From Customer Insight to Creative Strategy

This course explores the role of data in creative strategy — from audience understanding to the big, original idea. Structured around a Data → Information → Insight → Inspiration framework, it teaches students how to transform raw data into deep human insights, and those insights into creative strategy. Topics include: the fundamentals of audience research and measurement; the art of formulating the insight; creative brief development; and applications across advertising, media and the creative industries.

Students will develop the ability to articulate data-informed strategy while preserving the distinctly human leap that no AI tool can make on their behalf.

Course taught in English Language: at least a C1 level is required to enrol.

Recommended reading before the first session: Lewis (Michael), Moneyball, New York, W.W. Norton, 2003.

Interactive seminar of 2 hours per session (12 sessions).

Each session combines theoretical input, case studies drawn from advertising, media and the creative industries, group exercises, and student presentations. Sessions draw on assigned readings, film excerpts, and real-world data as pedagogical material.

Participation (20%) – Active engagement in sessions: quality of contributions, preparation of assigned readings, participation in discussions.

Group Project (30%) – A strategic and creative brief responding to a real-world challenge, presented in class. AI use is permitted.

Individual Deliverable (50%) – Data-informed audience research paper culminating in a creative brief and oral presentation. AI use is restricted for this deliverable: students must demonstrate their own capacity to make the leap from data to individual insight, in keeping with the central argument of the course.

Student use of AI: AI use is permitted during sessions and for the group project, in compliance with Sciences Po Institutional rules. It is however restricted for the individual deliverable : audience research, insight development, and creative brief writing must reflect the student’s own intellectual work. This distinction is grounded in the course’s central argument: the leap from data to individual insight is a human act that cannot be delegated to an automated tool.