Hasta La Creative!

On an icy January day, more than 75 ad-industry executives made their way to the upper Manhattan campus of City College of New York for a brainstorming session. Sitting in the 106-year-old Shephard Hall — an homage to the past, as one of the oldest Gothic campus buildings in the U.S. — the group came together to determine what would be the ideal marketing executive of the future.

City College will have a new graduate program in the fall semester for branding and integrated communications, or BIC, and professor and program director Nancy Tag was convening a brainstorming group of executives from mobile, interactive, public relations, branding, creative and human resources to determine what skills were going to be most important to teach.

The conclusion? The next-generation advertising exec will be a data geek with the soul of an artist, the business acumen of Warren Buffet and the storytelling skills of Don Draper. Importantly, the group zeroed in on data analysis and management as a crucial skill still lacking in many marketers and one that’s not being taught in many traditional marketing programs. Data scientists and people who are good at statistical analysis aren’t often the types interested in a marketing career.

Continue reading at AdAge.com