The next Albert Einstein has been born already.

He made a leap of thought that no one could have predicted. The leap took years of work, hours of discussions and collaboration, thousands of miles of travel. When he started the journey, he had no idea he was getting ready for a new idea of such magnitude.

The relativity theory was not deductible simply from the observations he’d made. Einstein’s work changed the world because it raced through the twentieth-century network of scientists, and then of writers, and then throughout the networks we call culture and history.

We can expect that the next Einstein is more likely to be a data wonk than an absent-minded professor. New software will correlate unrelated data sets and develop insights, theories and open new worlds to us. These program will make us rethink our thinking. The next Einstein will make sense of data that a program has uncomprehendingly flagged as interestingly anomalous.

The next Einstein is like to do her work in the public space, on the connected Web. Rather than waiting to publish final results, she will post early results and perhaps a speculative hypothesis. As word spreads, a web of links and connections will grow around her. Some nodes will turn into hubs, some hosted by amateurs others by professionals, scientists, businesspeople or scholars. We know, however, that many of the nodes and the threads that connect them will disagree, will argue, will go down a dead end, will be wrong, childish and selfish, will be a waste of the links that connects them. Still, we will be able to follow how an idea spreads and the effect it has as the competent and the nutty take it up, make it their own and pass it on.

This is not just a change of tools. The nature of the knowledge that the next Einstein uncovers will be different from that produced by Albert Einstein almost 100 years ago. Our new knowledge does not consist of a careful set of works that have passed through a series of narrow gates. We once believed that knowledge was scarce, when in fact our shelves were just small. Our new knowledge is not even a set of works: it’s an infrastructure of connection. We now travel through abundance as knowingly as we can, always within a context and from a point of view, always connected with others, always with the amount of care we judge is required. Knowledge is now a network with the characteristics of the Web.

We can argue all day if the new knowledge will bring us closer to the truth. We can’t argue that networked knowledge brings us closer to the truth about knowledge.

I was meeting with an advertising agency and one of the team members talked constantly about new insights. After we explored his insight, it seemed to me he was talking about an observation not an insight.

I’ve seen the word on job descriptions, data aggregators claim to produce insights, clients request them and agencies claim to produce them.

The word ‘insight’ is a case of over-promising and under-delivering

One explanation for the insight inflation is organizational: The executives responsible for producing insights are often located in the research and data aggregation department, trying to find small gems that may affect marketing. This can be on the client side or done through planners in the agency.  The other reason is that people believe everybody can observe but not many can be insightful

So, what’s the difference between an observation versus an insight?

Determining that new homeowners are more likely to buy a new car is an observation.

Understanding that putting snacks at the checkout register will increase sales dramatically because parents want to calm down/reward their kids is an observation.

According to Dictionary.com, an insight is an instance of apprehending the true nature of a thing, especially through intuitive understanding. I’ve been working in advertising for more than 15 years and I haven’t encountered many insights. I don’t mind it because I’d rather reserve light bulb moments for science.

I worked with a global airline the last two years and they wanted to understand why they had problems attracting business class customers. We looked through all the data, did focus groups, interview prospects one-on-one. We had many observations and no insights. The breakthrough came when we observed passengers in the business class lounge. They were more concerned getting to the lounge than getting to the final destination. Once you’re in the lounge, you’re in the luxury bubble that protects you until you pick up your luggage. This observation led to an insight: If you can extend the luxury bubble from the usual airport to airport to home to hotel, business class passengers will be more willing to buy your product.

Observations are rooted in data. Insights are rooted in outside sources.

Insight is rare ,“apprehending the true nature of a thing”, since we often have to find a different way of expressing similar ideas to the competition. What’s the difference between Chase and Wells Fargo? Toyota and Honda? Goodyear and Pirelli? There’s no insight that can make a difference, the solution lies in how you say things, the advertising idea. Trust me, a lot of brilliant people try to find insights for these brands and markets, they are just as rare as hitting the $800 million jackpot.

There are some extremely rare planners and creative’s out there, hitting the jackpot once in a blue moon. Millions wait for jackpots, just to end up a few bucks poorer. Maybe it’s time to elevate the importance of observations. A great novelist makes a living with observations, stand-up comedians do. Just like observations bring a brand to life.

Remember the Jetsons? The idea that robots and machines would do all the work for you while you can enjoy your life? Walking around the grounds of SXSW, one begins to think that something went awfully wrong. The machines are not here to serve us anymore, we’re serving and working for the machines. We’ve become slaves to the machines. The obsessive trap of compulsive loop systems like Email and Twitter keeps us busy engaging with the machines while we spend less time engaging with real-life humans.

Noisy technology has made us less human, less focused, less engaged with real people, problems and challenges.

Calm technology will get out of the way, let us live our lives as humans, unobstructed by technology and the need to push buttons all day. With calm technology, actions become buttons; invisible interfaces trigger interactions. Calm technology is just there, it works but it doesn’t require you to be glued to a device.

Just imagine: You geofenced multiple locations that you pass by each and every day. (Geofencing enables your actions to serve as buttons by creating persistent background locations that quietly track your every move.) While you leave the house, all unnecessary electronic items and lights will be switched off immediately. Since your work is only 10 minutes away, the geofence triggers the coffee machine to start up at your office and the computer to be turned on and ready for your arrival. (This example comes from Amber Case’s keynote at SXSW.)

It gets much deeper than that.

Imagine a device that records everything you do. It registers all the music you listen to, tracks each and every moment, knows who you interacted with, records when you work out and how intense, tracks your sleeping patterns, your food consumption, the quality of air you breathe – basically it tracks anything you do and encounter.

You already have that device in the palm of your hand most of the day. All above sounds a bit creepy because you’re afraid to share of the information with a third party. What are they going to do with that data? Increase your health insurance premium because you stopped at a burger joint once a week, didn’t work out enough and lived in smoggy conditions for 60 days a year? The scenario loses its creepiness when third parties don’t have access to it because you own the data. You control who has access to it.

How valuable would it be for your physicians to be able to access all your health data and provide you with better remedies to improve your health?

How fascinating would it be to explore your real-life social graph and encounters, the ones that’s tracked by your smartphone?

What amazing insights could we gather from all of our consumption habits and how to change them over time?

The majority of the data is already being collected. We don’t have access to it, private vertical silos do. Once we take real ownership of this data, we can really put that data to use. Currently, we create all this data to get incrementally more relevant advertising. Nice to have but nothing that changes my life dramatically. What will change lives is gathering this data in the background and putting it to important use: Health, Work, Entertainment, Education – you name it. That’s the revolutionary idea of VRM.

The future is not about being chained to the machines, feeding their insatiable appetite for data. The future is about integrating technology to improve lives, making our world a better place. That was always the idea, wasn’t it?

SXSW is overwhelming madness, as usual. I had 15 meetings already, more than 10 to go. It’s easy to google the person in advance or check their profiles.

The problem is, we tend to pretend to know others based on public information. What we share on social profiles is not really meant to be a real representation of ourselves. When you use the tools to create closeness and familiarity with the other person, you cheat just a little bit and try to trick your way into their emotional self.

It’s a common technique, used by traditional direct marketers. You offer a product/service based on previous purchases. Direct Marketers track the success diligently and optimize based on performance. When digital marketing took off, marketers tried to copy that direct response technique. Unfortunately, they were not as disciplined as their traditional counterparts and made bad assumptions.

You look at outdoor sports sites, let’s send you an email with a background featuring the great outdoors.

You visit a site for car enthusiasts and you’ll be considered one of them until the end of time. (Or until you delete your cookie.)

In real life, it’s often better to start a conversation without assuming anything, just being curious and open. In the digital marketing world, many digital campaigns don’t succeed because they are based on false assumptions.

If you want to be successful, you need to be sure that your assumptions are right. Or you better start out with a blank slate.