Creativity evokes emotion. Emotion creates desire. Desire drives action.
Today data has gone to the top of the command chain. But that's not necessarily a good thing — as it has also become a gate-keeper for creative thought. This massive swing to a data-first world has clipped the wings of our creativity. The problem is data can't create desire, only emotion can. And emotion is what drives action.
I've always been a science guy. Numbers, logic, reason, analysis, research, hypotheses, and testing are the things that make sense to me. When you have information and a process to interrogate that information, the truth becomes clearer. The more you interrogate, the clearer the truth becomes. The scientific method works — every time.
Throughout my career I've relied exclusively on the scientific method to solve client problems. I've found success in this and produced useful work. For some clients, me and my team destroyed all other traditional marketing efforts because it was impossible to compete with our performance. For every dollar we spent, we generated a multiple of that dollar in results, as predicted. Two times, three times, ten times. Every month our budgets would increase as we took money away from other channels and agencies. I remember with guilt that one agency we worked with folded because they lost their biggest ATL client to our digital team of two. Overall, I stopped thinking. In fact, embarrassingly, this became a part of my pitch — "What we think doesn't matter. Only the data matters." In many ways it was also useful for abdicating responsibility for our work with a "well, the data said" safety net.
I arrogantly thought I had it all figured out. It turns out I was wrong. Very wrong.
Data doesn't matter if you don't have attention
The most important lesson I've learned is that attention is key. Even the best targeting is useless if we can't also get the target's attention. In today's world, fighting for attention is harder than ever. We're no longer just competing against our competitors, we're also competing against every other type of online content. If we want attention, we need to earn it. We do that with big, bold and imaginative ideas. Creative ideas. We evoke an emotion. We tap into wants, not needs. We leverage desire. We stand out and we make ourselves totally unforgettable. We demand attention.
Creative ideas, validated by data
There is no data point that could have led to Volkswagen's "The Force" advertisement. It's an absurd idea, born in a coffee shop by a Star Wars nerd watching kids messing around. Despite the lack of data, it remains the most-watched Super Bowl ad of all time. And it started with a "what if" question and not a "the data says" statement. It was a creative idea that evoked emotion. Emotion which created desire and desire that led to action. The role of data should be to validate our ideas, not to drive them. Start with a bigger box, think outside the box and then let the data constrain it. A data-first approach creates a very small box with thick walls.
The data isn't wrong, but it's often badly interpreted
This isn't to say that the data should be ignored, obviously. But interpreting data is challenging. Collecting data is easy. Storing and sharing data is easy. Asking the right questions of the data is incredibly difficult and we often get it wrong. We've become data gluts and we've developed a nasty and lazy habit of just accepting it without asking better questions of it. Our ideas are then constrained by it.
There is no doubt that data is a powerful tool. I built a career on it. But if we're going to reap the benefits of it, we'll need to understand it better and use it appropriately. We'll need to become better data scientists and use the right tool for the right job.
Ideas which evoke emotion. Emotion that creates desire. Desire which drives action. And data to validate our ideas.