Hasta La Creative!

Imagine you were sitting in a meeting with the nonprofit ALS Association discussing how to increase your fundraising for the year and someone suggested that you ask people to dump buckets of ice water on their heads. There’s not a CMO or an agency creative director, or even a focus group in the world, who would have said, “I love it.” And yet we all know how the story ends. The “Ice Bucket Challenge” has been a viral hit and has raised more than $100 million.

In an age when marketers turn increasingly to technology to solve the toughest problems, you would expect that analytics and big data would help us find out what ideas will work and which ones will bomb.

Netflix, after all, can predict which movies you like. In his New York Times article, “Why Computers Won’t Be Replacing You Just Yet,” Sendhil Mullainathan recounts how three computer scientists have created an algorithm that can predict which tweets will get retweeted more often. In both these cases, the edge goes to big data, which can grind through huge amounts of information and find insights in surprising places. This is very seductive. If big data can help us predict what people will like, and what they will retweet, we’re one step closer to knowing what kinds of creative and content will penetrate the psyche of our audiences.

Continue reading at AdAge.com