This week, I’m traveling to Cincinnati to speak at Signal P&G. The theme of the event is “winning brand building at the speed of digital”. I’m looking forward to visiting the birth place of brand management to reflect on all of the seismic changes happening in marketing.
One of the biggest shifts is data-driven marketing. Increasingly, today’s marketers have to be data-savvy. This means performance tracking, analytics, and using data to create better marketing that the right consumers actually want to see. This can also mean programmatic marketing, where more and more aspects of campaigns are automated by data.
Data-driven marketing can create friction in the creative process. Creative and testing have often been uneasy bedfellows. It’s one thing to use rapid testing to optimize a media buy. It’s another to optimize the creative itself. Some ad platforms continuously change elements of ad units (font color, image, product, call to action) to determine what advertising creative performs best for what audience.
A lot of creatives will recoil at that type of formulaic approach. Analyzing creative can be like the famous E.B. White quote: “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.”
The future is figuring how to leverage the best of art and science in marketing.
(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment at 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)