To get a handle on how communications companies view the role of insights in their business, the Insights Association recently sat down with longtime insights executive Crispin Beale (pictured), now Worldwide CEO of IDX. The following are excerpts from that conversation.
Insights Association: You've spent nearly two decades embedded in the insights profession. Now you're running a communications and marketing agency. What does someone with that background see in communications that an insider might not?
Crispin Beale: Having been on the MRS Board, an ESOMAR UK representative, and CEO of Insight250, I noticed there is a gap. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. The insights industry has spent decades building rigorous standards around how you generate evidence, how you test it, how you present uncertainty honestly, and how you connect findings to decisions. That infrastructure of professional discipline is genuinely impressive.
Communications, broadly speaking, has not done the same work. The culture has been more instinct led, more hierarchical in how decisions get made, more comfortable with "we believe this will work" as a sufficient answer.
That gap used to be tolerable, but it no longer is. The environment has changed in ways that make instinct-led communications genuinely risky, not just suboptimal, but exposed. And that's the opportunity I saw at IDX.
Insights Association: When you say exposed, what specifically are you describing?
Crispin Beale: Three things have converged. Regulatory scrutiny has intensified across every major sector including but not limited to financial services, healthcare, ESG disclosure, consumer marketing. Stakeholder expectations of transparency and accountability have risen sharply. And AI-generated content has flooded every channel, which means the battle for credibility and trust is now the real contest, not the battle for volume or reach.
In that environment, a message that cannot be grounded in evidence doesn't just underperform, it becomes a liability. Reputationally, commercially, and in some sectors, legally.
The insights profession understands this instinctively. Methodological rigour, ethical standards, honest reporting of what the data can and cannot tell you are not just bureaucratic constraints. They're what gives the work its authority. Communications teams need to borrow that discipline urgently.
Insights Association: The insights industry has long struggled with what many call the "so what" problem, generating excellent data that doesn't actually change decisions. Do you see a parallel failure mode in communications?
Crispin Beale: Completely. However, it runs in the opposite direction. Where insights sometimes generate knowledge that never reaches action, communications sometimes reaches action without sufficient knowledge. The messages go out, the campaigns launch, the statements are made but the grounding isn't there.
What both problems share is a gap between evidence and decision. The insights profession is extraordinarily capable at generating and analyzing data. The harder problem, which is translating that into decisions organizations actually make and into communications that change the behavior of the people they're trying to reach, remains unsolved more often than it should be.
That is the problem IDX is positioning itself to solve for organizations and brands. Not by adding a data layer on top of existing communications, but by redesigning how communications get built in the first place, with evidence at the front of the process rather than the back.
Insights Association: You've been at the forefront of how AI is being adopted in both industries. Where do you see the potential risks?
Crispin Beale: The risk isn't enthusiasm for AI. Enthusiasm is fine. The risk is adoption without governance, without the professional standards, methodological honesty, and critical discipline that the best of both industries has always demanded.
In insights, that means being transparent about what synthetic methods can and cannot tell you. Synthetic audiences offer real value: rapid, cost-efficient, privacy-safe testing at a scale that wasn't previously possible. But they cannot replicate the depth of real human response where emotion, culture, and context are doing the work. Using them well means knowing their limits and being honest about them. That's not a limitation on innovation. That's what gives innovation credibility.
In communications, the parallel risk is using AI to accelerate output without asking the harder question: does this actually deserve to go out? AI raises the floor on content production. Once competent content becomes frictionless, the advantage moves to judgment including audience understanding, strategic clarity, and the ability to connect communication to actual behaviour change rather than just activity metrics. That judgment cannot be automated. It requires the kind of rigorous human thinking both our industries are built on.
Insights Association: IDX has just joined the Insights Association. What does that membership mean in practice beyond the badge?
Crispin Beale: It means we are making a public commitment to the standards this community holds. The Insights Association's Code of Standards isn't a formality. It represents a set of professional obligations around quality, integrity, and ethical practice that we are choosing to be held to.
For a communications business moving deeper into data and insights, that matters. Clients need to know that the evidence underpinning their communications strategy has been generated and interpreted with rigour. The IA membership is a signal to customers, partners, and internally that we take that obligation seriously.
It also reflects something I believe genuinely: the insights community and the communications industry need each other more than either has fully acknowledged. IDX joining the Insights Association is, in part, a statement that we intend to close that gap from our side.
Insights Association: What would you want communications leaders reading this to take away?
Crispin Beale: That the standard you've been holding yourselves to is no longer sufficient.
Show your thinking. Show what supports it. Be honest about what you don't know. Those are habits the insights community has developed over decades of professional discipline. They are also, increasingly, what customers, regulators, and stakeholders are demanding from communications.
The organizations that will perform consistently over the next decade are those that treat evidence as the foundation of strategy, not the footnote. That shift is already underway. For communications leaders, that means they need to decide now if they want to get ahead of it or be left trying to catch up later.
Insights Association: And for the insights industry, what's the opportunity here?
Crispin Beale: The opportunity is significant. The decisions being made in communications – what to say, to whom, in what tone, through which channels – are audience decisions. They are, in effect, insights decisions. Every one of them should be informed by the kind of rigorous audience understanding the insights profession specializes in.
The boundary between the two disciplines is beginning to blur. The insights professionals who recognize that earliest, and who are willing to work at that intersection, will define what both industries become.
IDX is a proud member of the Insights Association.