In the business, marketing and advertising world, we are often lumped into one of two silos – creative or numbers. Those two silos seem like they shouldn’t mingle very often, but as explained recently at the AAF-KC’s Atomic Fusion Lab, those two key focus areas are not mutually exclusive and shouldn’t be.

Suzanne Van Cleve and Wayne Kaufmanschmidt led the presentation and workshop and showed how these two disciplines inform each other and can be essential in today’s marketing world. Van Cleve has worked mainly on the client side with leadership roles at Intuit, Oracle and Adobe. It was at Intuit, working for TurboTax, where she worked together with Kaufmanschmidt, one time creative director at VML and current head of digital strategy at Trozzolo.

Van Cleve said she has always been interested in how to measure the results of marketing efforts and how to draw creative strategies from data and analytics. Kaufmanschmidt worked with her to understand the key metrics that she was looking to meet at TurboTax and together they worked on ways to deliver on the needs.

In coming up with concepts, one of the keys is collecting and using data to substantiate the views or hypothesis. That means in asking questions like, what are our common goals? What customer problem can I solve? Can customer insight improve our insight? Those questions can often be great first steps into developing ideas and concepts that include informed data, the pair said.

After using data, the pair then talked about how in brainstorming and concepting using an analytical mindset can be useful to evaluate ideas. For instance, they recommended using tools like a two-by-two chart to brainstorm. So that may mean on one axis is the information (Just a taste on one side and the full store on the other) in an idea and on the other axis is likeability (Very to not at all). When brainstorming, you can group ideas into one of the four quadrants and then determine where the sweet spot is. These two-by-twos can be done for a variety of factors and drill down further into an idea.

Another main factor of Van Cleve and Kaufmanschmidt’s presentation was how data and measurement of a campaign can inform the next move in any marketing or advertising plan. For instance, data from a campaign can answer questions like:

• What changed?
• Why did it change?
• How do we recreate or maximize the good?
• How do we remove or minimize the bad?
• Explain the unexpected

What the pair said you are looking for in delving into the analytics of a campaign is – what was the lever? What they mean by lever is what was moved to make change happen. Was it your call to action? Was it the brilliant creative? Was it the channels where your creative lived? The real knowledge is gleaned when you can identify and examine those levers.

As a creative myself, presentations like this do help to frame how we can use data and analytics to our advantage. Many of us are sitting on mountains of data and we can deliver more informed messaging to customers – messaging they’re more apt to respond to if we just allow creative and data to get nice and cozy.

To see their presentation and assets from the meeting, you can go here.