There’s 2.5 quintillion bytes of data in the world every day – but it’s nothing without a story

When we started out, everyone was talking about media, audiences and data, but never the design. That was put on back burner because people didn’t know how to activate it. It was the biggest frustration when I worked in media sales. Data and media, on the other hand, are easily accessible and trafficked. So people put creative in the too-hard basket, especially with mobile.

So then I thought, “How do we make creative easily accessible?” The first step was to make sure our mobile-first interactive ads could work across multiple websites and platforms. In the past, a publisher would come in and build an ad but it would only work on their own sites. If you’re then buying five or six different types of ad units, you’ll have a nightmare in approvals. I said we need to be closer to the brand’s media and data, but doing that requires us to work with the brand or media agency. That means the finished product can run everywhere and scale across all platforms. It also means we can create a report showing how well our creative did across every publisher – giving brands a direct comparison.

People talk data, but there’s 2.5 quintillion bytes of data in the world every day – how much of that is useful without a story? Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. Why don’t people talk about creative as much? Because it takes intel, skill and time to make creative. Data defines an audience, yes, but creative tells the story. Brands have to focus on making these disciplines work together and stop siloing them.