8CIOReview | | DECEMBER 2021IN MY OPINIONDATA & CREATIVITY: NO LONGER DISTANT RELATIVESBy Marc Sanford, Chief Data Science Officer, GTBAs the marketing world knows, conversations around MarTech have been dominated lately by the Cookiepocalypse (or death of third-party cookies) dialogue. So, I'd like to take a fresh and different approach to talking about the conversation...one where data that is created by the various platforms and data collection systems and related analytical approaches are more than a use of measurement, personalization, and an understanding of the business.Rather than talking about tracking mechanisms, I would like to posit that data and analytics are the most creative space in modern marketing and more closely related to the creative process than ever.Data and creativity are typically not two terms that come into close contact with each other.However, with the rapidly changing marketplace around data, data technology, analytics applications, platforms, and data privacy and security, this has opened more room for creativity within the data space than ever before.And it also opens up the relationship of data to the creative generation process itself.Data is fundamentally tied to brand expression (and creativity) at every level.To understand this connection, we need to understand what data is.Data is people.Data is behavior.Data is beliefs.Data is emotions. Data is culture.Data is brand.Data is communications.Data is interactions.Data is design.Data is language and images. Data is time.Data is health. Data is race, ethnicity, and demographics. But most importantly, data is a way of becoming more human. It is a way of meeting people and understanding places we've never had the opportunity to know.In that Marc Sanford
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