Creativity in the times of Data
In my career at consultancies, specifically focused on the broad marketing arena, I had the privilege of experience the start of the Consultancy vs Agencies era, where technology consultancies looked ahead and saw a data-driven world coming and that the marketing area was specially prone to get into it. One thing that consultancies are still trying to figure out is how to fit the creative areas, that typically drive the Ad Agencies decisions, into their structured, value-based, data-driven operation. This might seem like a very niche challenge, but in fact it also affects big companies and moderns startups.
Historically creatives and marketers had a great disdain for anything related to data, in their view data’s only purpose is to kill the creativity and art in advertising, they preferred to rely on their instinct rather than be boxed in by the constraints of research and data. This is the usual case for professions that still see their craft as more art than science, which are 2 things that, today we know, have very blurred boundaries. Also, as clients also were used to isolating their areas, the creatives didn’t get much chance to use their valuable skills in business areas other than Advertising, something that started to change with the arrival of very specialized design thinking and product design agencies.
On the other hand, data scientists, analysts, and all the rest of the data posse, as professionals who specialized in very specific rules of mathematics and statistics, find it very difficult to go beyond their boundaries, to twist the rules to find innovations and insights, or simply, to go out in the real world (like creatives usually do) to see and try to understand what the data is showing. Instead, they rely on the very technical skills of mining and manipulate data to build working models that can describe, diagnose, predict, and prescript specific actions. Historically they were also kept into isolated areas very obviously related to number crunching, like finance and business consulting. With the digital and data revolution, the new digital companies brought those professionals to other areas like product management and digital marketing.
These two characters, creatives & data scientists, poets & quants, consultancies & ad agencies, are commonly seen as antagonists as it is very hard to find both traits in the same human being so they are perceived as mutually exclusive. But the notion of opposites is totally wrong, as they actually complement each other and their coordination and rapport are key for the future of marketing.
One thing to know clearly is that data is not the “hard cold truth”, it is more like Plato’s cave allegory, where data is only the shadow of real-life and those dealing with the numbers need to analyze and hypothesize what the numbers mean in real life, and then try to confirm it through testing. Data is there to inform and guide, not to control. Because of this situation, the breadth of vision is key to generate hypotheses and get the right insights from data, therefore the creative skill is key for this, otherwise very quantitative, work to succeed.
Of course, you can say that, in theory, if we leave computers to test all the campaign and creative variables they will eventually find the best one. Yes, but if you are going to take a Darwinian approach on marketing evolution, expect a Darwinian pace of progress. So in a couple of centuries, you might have the right campaign.
Data is also key for the creative work as it helps to confirm if an idea/innovation will resonate with the intended audience, great marketers use their gut, which we know is based on data learned in the trade and now processed by their subconscious, but companies can’t only rely on finding this star data-driven creative marketers, as they need to have a consistent team. So what have they tried to solve this?
Consultancies, the lair of quants and other structured minds, first dove in the creative world through the Customer Experience focused Design Thinking (later expanding it to Enterprise Design Thinking), it was a perfect fit as the consulting work was, until then, very focused on the inner workings of companies and how to make them more efficient and paid zero attention to customer experience (apart from the new tech companies, nobody really did). Also, Design Thinking is a very well structured and paced creative/design work that would generate experience hypothesis that could be later tested and confirmed by data.
After consolidating their Design Thinking practice, consultancies started trying out the sacred realm of the agencies by bringing some Chief Creative Officers aboard, their task being to create the same consolidated practice as the Design Thinking work done previously. This is being a lot harder because most CCO’s are usually trying to replicate the agency creative structure inside the consultancies which is not a perfect fit like Design Thinking. This happens because, to fit the consulting world, the creative area should stop being seen as a core area, the only source of creative truth, to be a more cooperative and embedded skill inside the consulting and modern marketing work. This loss of protagonism, which was also a small point of conflict for the Design Thinking people (they are creatives after all), is a very hard sell for creatives that come from the Ad Agency world. Also, the creative work, as the data analysis work, shouldn’t be a specific area but a skill embedded in all the work done by consultancies.
Conversely, Ad agencies and marketers used data as marginal input for their work only as a gimmick for the campaigns (data make-up) and not as a core piece of brand strategy for their clients. This is not because they didn’t want to, but because this internal change is a hard sell for a place dominated by creatives. This is changing lately given the heat put by the CEOs and CFOs over the marketing area showing more accountability and clear participation in the company results. The CMOs logically delegate that pressure to the ad agencies who will need to justify their actions with clear attributable data. For that reason, the agencies have created their data areas that should be responsible for doing that, but again, they are still siloed, totally separated from their creative antagonists.
The answer to this challenge is pretty clear for many in the industry, Peter Horst, laid it out pretty clearly:
“With the pace of change and new complexities in the marketing environment, and the blurring of boundaries between functions, you need people who “egolessly” go beyond their functional silo boundaries to collaborate and focus less on turf and ownership and more on how to connect to do great things together.”
There is a way of restructuring teams in a way that those silos are broken, and this way is well known in the technology and startup world, it is called (broadly) as Agile. I’m not going to praise all the benefits of the Agile Methodologies (there are many), instead, I’m going to talk just on the way teams are structured, the Squads and Chapters. In a very simplistic way, as most of you may know, squads are small multi-skill teams (3 to 9 people according to Scrum Guide) that together work on specific objectives in a specific time frame (scrum) or pipeline (kanban). Chapters are cross squads communities of people with the same practice/skill that has the objective of developing it through knowledge sharing and support.
For the marketing work, this would work exactly like that, with creatives and quants split and mixed into squads, to work together with the same shared objective and culture, while benefiting from their respective chapters to update themselves and seek help from colleagues with the same skill set. No more silos, cumbersome hand-offs, culture differences, and us-vs-them mentality.
Some companies (mostly digital natives and startups) already use agile teams for marketing, but only some of them mix both creatives and quants in the same squad and are benefiting greatly from the close work, shared objectives, and culture. Most companies who use agile teams are trying to turn quants into creatives, still ignoring the need for a ingenious mind to do the unexpected link between what data shows and create innovative insights and products out of it.
The challenge is to define what this creative role should be, many modern methods simply ignore the need for it as they assume the creativity is inherent to the team and driven by the process. Sean Ellis, for example, say in his excellent "Hacking Growth" book:
This is why growth hacking is designed to bring the rigor of scientific experimentation to the creative process. What this means is that you don't need to be a marketing savant like (Steve) Jobs to get language/market fit right; the growth hacking process will get you there.
Anyone that worked in a team made up by solely data focused engineers knows that this is simply now true. The need for a team member that can help others think differently is key to escape the darwinian pace inside the marketing team/squad. Otherwise the team will be stuck in mediocre cycles of idea and insights generation that will take much longer to bring value. I believe that Ellis might have underestimated the power of the individual talent that worked in the teams he had experience with, and overestimated the power of the method.
Ideation helps getting the team into a more creative mode, but you'll get the "aha!" moment more often if you have the creative skill in, at least, one of the members of that team. This can be the Product Owner/Manager, who knows and represents the business; the Product/Service/Interaction designer, who traditionally have the skill to do her core job; or a new role, that can be cross squads to avoid being biased by doing the same work over and over again. The talent just needs to be in the mix.
