“Marketing is art and science. For a while we over-indexed on art. Now we risk over-indexing on science.”

Alicia Dietsch, Vice President of Marketing Communications & Operations, AT&T

When Don Draper’s 1960s character (it’s OK, we realise he was never a real person in advertising) would win over a client with a spark of creativity, we can say that was a time when we were “over-indexed on art”, as Alicia Dietsch put it.

But today increasingly companies are slaves to data. People right now are developing whole careers on a ‘data, data, data’ mantra. Data is good – don’t get us wrong – but working only using data is equally unhealthy.
At a recent roundtable of CMOs I attended, one line from an attendee was that “creativity is starting to go, [marketing is] becoming much more numbers driven”.

We like the quotation from Dietsch (disclosure: we have written for AT&T in the past) because it speaks to the balance between art and science, between left brain and right brain.

Trends may change over the years but let’s always try to maintain this balance.
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