How not to judge creative OR death by committee-titis

When you start something new, you learn a great deal by trial and error. You make mistakes and then you figure out the right way or someone teaches you. Sometimes, certain mistakes take longer to spot and correct. One such mistake is the tendency of new marketing executives to judge a creative piece, in pieces.

The tendency is to make sure that everything in the list has been done correctly. They start ticking off the different requirements and parts of the creative and when all ticks are there, they feel that the objective has been met.

What they do not realize is that the whole is much greater than the parts. If you breakdown a creative piece into several parts, you may get all of them right separately, but together everything may not work out very well.

Let’s have a look at what the requirements and parts are that a beginner marketing executive will look out for and tick off.

Well everything is ticked, so let’s have a look at the final creative. Read more...

Is Big Data going to affect creativity in advertising – looks like it!

We creative people already have to contend with Research and now here comes Big Data. Being a creative person, I won’t be able to demystify Big Data for you, but I can give you a rough and ready idea. Big Data is the massive amounts of information gathered from a variety of electronic sources (even video and audio recordings come under the purview of Bid data).

However, it broadly be divided into two chunks - internal information of large organizations consisting of intranets, emails, documents, chat messages, logged data and others, and the other chunk is made up of any kind of chatter about a brand in all social media and sharing websites.

The first chunk from within organizations doesn’t really affect creativity though it might have a big impact on the marketing strategy. The second chunk, however, could.

If you have a campaign running on TV or in newspapers or on the Internet, and there is some bad chatter about it, through Big Data decoding you might get to hear about it very quickly. And you know how easy it is for someone somewhere to get offended by something they have seen somewhere and write about it.

After a short period of time, when you redo the campaign and make it safer, and it still generates negative chatter, then you might hear about it very very quickly.

You can go on fixing it and making it safer etc. etc. but this is just me imagining about a possible scenario. There are already people out there who are doing this all the time, analyzing Big Data and altering the communication according to it.

It can bring out brilliant opportunities, and result in a first mover killer communication, and it can also kill off good creative ideas.

I guess only when the Cloud over Big Data clears will we really know ;)