“the creative” is a column focused on the creative side of digital marketing.
Today’s Q&A is with Tom Moran, Executive Creative Director of Seattle-based digital shop POP.
AdExchanger.com: Is there a divide between media and creative today?
Absolutely not. In the big picture, media is just one of many touch points in the overall creative experience. It’s a medium to get the customer to engage and experience the brand. To be a creative inside the digital landscape, you must be able to think and execute across all digital media.
As digital media increasingly involves the use of complex data and analytics, what must creatives do to thrive and remain successful?
Creatives must not fear quantitative analysis of their work, but should instead embrace the power those insights can bring.
With access to near real-time data about the effectiveness of our work, we now have an opportunity to take calculated risks. Nothing excites me more than receiving detailed information about what makes our audience tick. The more we know about the target audience, the better our team can create personalized, rich and impactful brand experiences.
We must better understand the performance of what we are creating, review the data real-time and make adjustments accordingly. We must be willing to accept and embrace this continuous feedback loop, refine our vision, and
refine it quickly. Now more than ever, creatives must embrace change (in hyper speed).
How do you expect the creative agency model to evolve in the coming 2-3 years?
Over the next 2-3 years mobile and social will massively expand their importance in the marketing mix. Mobile and social are not mere tactics -they are disruptive technologies that will change the agency landscape and will redefine what clients expect from their agency partners.
Agencies must recognize this and quickly adapt, lest they find themselves headed toward irrelevance. The challenges traditional advertising agencies faced in the mid-90s with the emergence of the Web should serve as a lesson for “traditional” digital agencies today. In short, agencies must evolve or face extinction.
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