Why Brands must Prioritise Creative Content in a Data-driven Marketplace?

A picture paints a thousand words, and a word can paint a thousand pictures while a truly creative piece of content achieves both. In a rapidly mechanising world, our creative freedom is the essence of what makes us human. It helps us understand and empathise with each other. We can strike an emotional chord and capture the imagination of a large audience by tapping into the resources of our creativity. But as services and products rapidly multiply and oversaturate the marketplace, the population becomes more and more goal-oriented.

Is a tool of vast and undefined proportions such as our imaginativeness being slowly deemed too unmanageable and irreproducible for success? 

• The Rise of the Information Age

Data is the new king, sitting on the throne of empirical evidence. It is the main source of inspiration for businesses around the world. It has led to many successful customer-oriented models that hone in on target audiences, shifting through their likes and dislikes in a relaxed setting, before coming to pinpoint conclusions about the nature of their wants and needs. Even the most creative minds who prefer instinct over research are basing their decisions on information accumulated throughout their lives. In this way, they revert to big data for their decision-making. 

Looking toward the future we already see Artificial Intelligence making basic creative choices through accumulated databases. Data-driven strategies are the most important instrument in optimising marketing campaigns and streamlining methods of communication, saving time and expenditure. This has led to a feeling of doom and gloom among many content creators, who complain of being trapped in an imaginary box. This is due to a highly misguided consensus that creativity and statistics are polar opposites, while they are two sides of the same coin.

• The Unification of Data and Creativity

Data-driven strategies are the act of listening, while our creativity lends itself to speaking and communication. For a successful operation and its maintenance, these two facets inform each other throughout the process. Being creative without evidence is basically a shot in the dark, as previously collected data actually guides a creative process to fruition. It establishes a basis for all experimentation and provides dimensions to our creativity, keeping us focused on our goals.

The only means of success is in the way a product or service connects with the audience, and understanding your client base through data needs to be the root of all creative operations. On the flip side, data helps us find our target customer base but due to the wide range of goods available, people are already fed up with generalised information being regurgitated back in their direction.

The modern generation has a rapidly debilitating attention span and data has no solution except to point it out. There is a lack of reciprocity and this is where creative intelligence comes into the picture.

• The Relevance of Emotive Content

The ability to say a lot with a little, the harmonious combination of numbers, letters, and art to create the best possible messaging in logos, packaging, websites, apps, promotional images, blogs, and social media posts, to the physical display of the office itself all play a major role in breaking down communicational barriers and forming a relationship with the customers.

Data helps us identify our target audience but it’s up to the creative team to understand their true motivations and the complexities behind their actions. At the end of the day, no matter how much machine and algorithm-oriented learning has been done, it’s still not possible to determine the emotional investment behind our financial decisions. It takes another human being to put themselves in the customer’s shoes to truly helm the information to its advantage.

The pitfalls of combining our creativity with research are navigating between high art and playing it too safe. It can lead to creative frustrations or settling for the same tried and tested methods for the umpteenth time. Tilting the scales to either side meanders us away from the end result, which is finding emotive ideas that connect with our identified consumer base. It is also important to note the discrepancies in data learning as there are instances of glitches in the system, data manipulation, and the rapid decay of information.

In a way, creative solutions have never taken a step back in the marketplace. They’ve adapted themselves to the modern age seamlessly manifesting in different forms, backed by data and research, trying to open up more space in personalised marketing. The contentious instances that point to the failure of creative marketing or data-driven strategies lack one or the other.

The author, Sauhitya Garadabu is the founder of FdMS, a creative digital performance marketing agency based in Mumbai.