Difference is not deviance

I’m leading a breakout session at this year’s IPA Effectiveness Conference about a subject that’s both deeply personal and critically important for the industry; understanding who we are speaking to.

I have ADHD and Hypermobile Spectrum Disorder (HSD), both of which affect how I interact with the world; cognitively, physically, emotionally. My brain and body don’t always follow the patterns others expect. It’s not better, not worse, just different. What it does mean is that I have spent my career watching marketing models treat people like me as edge cases.

This session is a provocation. A call to re-examine the assumptions we build into our strategies, and to ask a simple but urgent question: who are we leaving out?

In marketing, we prize certainty.

We reach for rules.

We build our plans around benchmarks, patterns, and averages that promise predictability in a world that rarely offers it.

But we all know that that certainty is not true. Behind that tidy surface lies an uncomfortable truth: our most trusted models often ignore the very people they claim to represent.

We talk about what “works on average” as if that tells us something universal. But it doesn’t. It tells us what works for most people, most of the time, in most studies. And even then, only when we define “most people” in narrow, convenient terms.

What happens when you’re not in that majority?

One in five people in the UK are neurodivergent. That’s not a rounding error and it’s not a sudden fact. This is a seismic shift in how attention, memory, and emotional response can operate. So why does our industry’s commentary on attention assume a more linear relationship? One that makes little room for brains that flicker, focus, and filter in different ways.

More than 16 million people in the UK live with a disability. The financial cost of that reality is well documented. And yet these audiences are almost entirely brushed over in our effectiveness models. Rarely segmented, rarely studied, rarely centred. We talk about inclusion in casting, but not in strategy. This relentless focus on simplicity leads to optimisation for convenience, not reality.

This is not a discussion about political correctness, rather practical mismeasurement and missed money. If we smooth over large, materially distinct groups in the data we use to define success, we are not being evidence-based. We are being comfortable. We are designing systems that prioritise the familiar and calling the rest “outliers.”

But what if the outliers are telling us what our models can’t?

What if difference isn’t something to flatten, but something to understand?

This session is a challenge to the assumption that there is one right way to do marketing. There isn’t. There are many good ways. And most of them begin by asking: who are we not seeing?

We will not throw out the playbook. But we will ask whether the rules we follow are rules because they work, or simply because they are easy to measure. We will explore the possibility that the future of effectiveness is not about refining what we already know but broadening who we choose to learn from.

You will not leave with a framework.

You might leave with a better question.

Because difference is not deviance.

It is the reality our models have been trying to round off for too long.

Robert Beevers is Chief Effectiveness and Analytics Officer at MG OMD and will be running a breakout session at the IPA Effectiveness Conference 2025.

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