As marketers, you’re at the forefront of developments in technology and data. In two years, more data has been created than in the whole history of humanity. And it doesn’t look like slowing down. By 2020, there will be 6.1 billion smartphones globally, constantly collecting information about their owners, from their demographic info to their attitudes, hopes, fears, and beliefs.
Famed creative leader David Ogilvy said, “Give me the freedom of a tight brief”? Tech advances in mobile, data collection and ad serving give you the ability to collect consumer information, accurately target audiences and analyze and optimise your creative output. This forces you to work within strict creative frameworks, which taxes your thinking and generally leads to the most robust and effective creative ideas. Many of the greatest creative minds of our age, from Ogilvy to T.S. Eliot, have argued that too much creative freedom leads to lazy, undefined, sprawling creative.
So, you know that technology and data can be used to improve creative effectiveness, but these areas are often treated like church and state. How can you blend technology and creativity?
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Great piece! I have worked in businesses that embrace tech and explore all of the opportunities with excitement and open-mindedness. This always fostered an innovative, curious and creative culture and work! In contrast, I have also worked in places that are reluctant to break ‘traditional’ ways of doing things even if they appear broken. Reasons for this way of thinking usually relate to budget or time.
Automation is the future of creative. Any complacent agency folk need to be taking a good look at themselves. If machines are writing articles for journalists, how long till they are producing ads?
It certainly would be great to have such specific and personalised creative served to consumers. The amount of impressions currently served on multiple platforms miss the target audience most of the time. Having the ability for automated creative to be served should in theory result in much higher click through rates, but I don’t think we’ll be there for a while yet…
It’s all well and good to talk about generating multiple versions and targeting individuals with specific creative messaging, but a machine can never come up with a creative idea, so how do you propose to add all the extra hours to the day to actually implement these ideas? Good ideas but pie in the sky at present. One day maybe. One day. Wouldn’t it be nice.
Shifting the internal culture within the business is a really good point. In any industry I’ve worked in, more often than not the work is discussed separately between teams and then problems occur when it comes to actually putting the project into action. Much more productive to work as one team from the beginning.