The advertising industry has undergone some significant changes over the past few years. In today’s day and age, the growing significance of data is making the rules. But could this be stifling creativity?
Let’s take a look and see if the surge of making decisions on the basis of numbers and insight affects the flow of ideas and vise versa.
Data & Creativity
Do you ever find yourself at a crossroads wondering if you should channel through the right-brained creativity or adapt a more data-driven approach? You’re not alone.
Creativity and science have been butting heads for a long time. In this cognitive boxing match, it has always been left vs. right with very little space for compromise. Although both play an integral role in any and every business, pursuing only one individually has far more disadvantages than it has advantages.
Data: The Driving Force
It has become common practice to understand the customer and their journey as best as possible. Although this can be achieved by wearing your empathetic hat, it can only get you so far.
Consumer’s needs have become sophisticated and if brands don’t recognize this and do what they can to meet their needs, they may as well wave the white flag.
The methodical guised data plays a vital role in connecting with the customer on a fundamental level. It allows you to uncover insights about people that would not be known otherwise. Data helps you understand prehistorical performance in order to make improvements going forward and avoid past mistakes.
Yes, data could be seen as reading through stacks of information, trying to find the needle in the haystack but without data, we wouldn’t know which haystacks hide that needle and which don’t, leaving us aimlessly ‘spraying and praying’.
Creativity: The Organised Chaos
Although creativity cannot be defined singularly, it’s what’s responsible for inspiring new ways of thinking, working and creating.
Again, with the ever-evolving needs of consumers, we need to keep generating new, innovative ways of reaching them in a way that speaks to them at a human level.
Technology is becoming more advanced faster than we can comprehend and in that, we need to remember that there is a human being on the other side of the screen. In order to cut through the noise and speak in a way that our customers understand in the midst of technological advancement, we need to employ creativity to create an emotional bond and generate tangible engagement.
So, does creativity or data have the upper hand?
Neither.
Enter Creative Ingenuity
As we’ve seen, data helps map the buyer’s journey, but creativity is what carries your prospects and customers through it. Which is why it shouldn’t be creativity or data, but a combination of the two, working seamlessly together to create a new breed: creative ingenuity.
Allow it to be the science of art and the art of science, combined and collaborated, to create quantitative art that augments data with creativity to redefine the way things are done for the better.
