No one in their right mind would suggest that having a mountain of data and machine intelligence to investigate it for patterns and trends isn’t valuable. The applications are seen in every field of activity from traffic management to healthcare.

For those of us engaged in communications, what is often referred to as data driven marketing is of particular interest. Using many types of data, including behaviourial, contextual, psychographic, demographic and geographic as well as results from our own activity, provides us with more insights about our customers and potential customers. Indeed, it now embraces the holy of holies the creative process.  Data driven creativity, it is said, will revolutionise advertising by ensuring that our creative outputs are precisely tailored to appeal to highly specific audience segments.

What’s not to like? The better we understand the people we wish to influence the more successful we are likely to be. True as long the wealth of tools available don’t mislead us by resulting in less, rather than improved, strategic thinking. Already, there are those that believe that we don’t need to ponder too much because we can now test any approach in real time and replace it if it doesn’t work. This though is surely a loss of vision.

The key to success in marketing and its creative application lies in seeing what others don’t see, in making a leap beyond the insights provided, no matter their quality or quantity! Deny this and we and our competition will simply cancel each other out.  Instead, we should be informed by the wealth of data we have, not driven by it.  Great marketing or creative vision, informed by AI and the insights it delivers, is the future we should be striving for. Anything less is selling ourselves short!