People: Gilding Offers In:site To Agencies

W hether she's observing a group of gorillas in the mist or a foursome of CEOs in a sand trap, Emma Gilding is conducting an anthropological experiment. Gilding is president of in:site, an ethnographic think-tank unit of Omnicom Diversified Agency Services.

"A culture is really just a group of people living under a set of rules, codes and conventions, and business is a driving culture today," said Gilding, who is based in New York. "We have fewer ties to community. But we're all consumers."

The first ethnographer to study senior and C-level executives, Gilding took her anthropology degrees and background into the concrete jungle about a decade ago, when she crossed the Atlantic from England to work for agency Ogilvy & Mather. Studying consumers in their natural habitats was a new idea at the time, and she founded The Discovery Group to pursue her work at the agency. Then, she decided to turn the cameras on the hunters: the high-powered execs.

Early on, she spent one day trailing and filming a group of top-level businessmen around a golf course. While observations at first seemed fruitless, by the 18th hole she realized that over the course of play the executives had used golf lingo, body communications and other "language" to work out a business deal. For upper-level execs, Gilding often will round up experts from a host of disciplines—such as a financial analyst, a sociologist, a semiologist—and, basically, move the team into the board room to observe.

Gilding's research helps Omnicom's 170 agencies understand their clients and their customers in order to create advertising, corporate communications and marketing based on the findings. To record client behavior, in:site often brings in a documentary filmmaker.

"We look for common patterns, common reactions, differences between what [people] say they do and what they actually do, which is profound," said Gilding. "Then we edit a film that explains the model of behavior," and the agency can take it from there.

"When you ask people if they eat healthy, most are going to say 'Yes,'" said Gilding, recalling a survey among people who had heart attacks. "They might go and buy tofu and [other healthy food], but they can't keep it up. The first thing I do is check their fridges for half-eaten containers of tofu."