We have become accustomed to a particular moment in marketing meetings. The creative work is presented, and the room is engaged. People debate the idea, the visual language, the content, and whether the work feels right for the brand. Then the performance data appears, and the mood changes.
We have seen highly accomplished creative people become surprisingly adversarial when the conversation turns to measurement. The spreadsheet comes out and, metaphorically at least, some people fall asleep.
We understand why.
In Click Here: The Art & Science of Digital Marketing & Advertising, Meta CMO Alex Schultz writes about encountering exactly this tension when he took over marketing at Meta. He was characterised as a “numbers nerd” replacing a “rockstar marketer”, with an underlying concern that a measurement-led leader might diminish creativity. Schultz acknowledges that the fear is not entirely irrational: poorly applied measurement can create risk aversion, encourage teams to optimise only what is easily measured, and ultimately reduce creativity.
But that is an argument against bad measurement, not against numbers.
This distinction matters because the industry has spent too long trapped in what we consider the tyranny of the “or”: brand or performance, creativity or analytics, art or science. We should be far more interested in the power of the “and”.
Great marketing requires creativity and accountability. It requires instinct and evidence. The challenge is not to determine whether creative people or number people should win; it is to work out how each discipline makes the other better.
At Offernet, our work often begins with measurement. We want to understand the customer journey properly: what happened after an impression, after a click, after a lead, and what ultimately occurred offline.
That sometimes makes creative agencies uncomfortable, because measurement can seem like judgment. The campaign runs, the analyst arrives afterwards and tells everybody which creative “won”.
We think that is one of the least interesting things an analyst can do with data.
The more valuable conversation begins when measurement reveals something unexpected. Perhaps a particular audience is converting disproportionately well. Perhaps Android and iOS users behave differently. Maybe one message generates fewer leads, but those leads convert into customers at a significantly higher rate. Maybe a campaign performs differently by age, gender, device, placement or funnel stage..
None of that tells the creative team what to make. It gives them something far more useful: a problem worth solving.
Schultz illustrates this in his discussion of personalisation. At eBay, analysis of gender-relevant merchandising uncovered differing customer responses and, in the process, exposed assumptions within a predominantly male design team. The data did not create the idea; it revealed an opportunity that creative thinking could exploit.
That is the relationship we would like to see between performance and creative teams. The analyst should be able to say, “We have found something interesting”. The creative response should be, “What can we do with it?”
This leads to something we think the industry often gets the wrong way round. Data does not necessarily reduce the amount of creative work required. In digital marketing, the data can be dramatically increased.
Once we understand that customers behave differently across audiences, devices, platforms, and funnel stages, the notion of producing a single piece of creative and distributing it everywhere becomes increasingly limiting.
Schultz repeatedly makes this point. Creative should be appropriate to the environment in which it appears. A static, silent execution dropped into a vertical, sound-on video environment is not simply a media problem; it is a creative problem. Likewise, a beautiful creative that performs flawlessly on a premium handset but provides a poor experience on a lower-powered device cannot really be described as universally excellent.
Data, therefore, creates more creative questions. It gives us hypotheses to test, audiences to understand, executions to adapt, and results from which to learn.
This should be particularly exciting for genuinely talented creative people. As the production of generic marketing content gets easier, the premium shifts towards people capable of taking an insight and transforming it into an idea that is distinctive, persuasive, and appropriate to its context.
Measurement does not make those people less valuable; it makes their contribution easier to identify.
Schultz describes Meta’s creative leadership philosophy as: “Focus on the results, and the awards follow”. There is an uncomfortable but useful idea in that statement. Data is not killing creativity; it is making mediocre creativity more difficult to defend, purely on subjective grounds.
That challenge works both ways. Numbers people need to stop pretending that a dashboard can have an idea, just as creative people need to stop treating a spreadsheet as the enemy.
The future of marketing does not belong to one side of this divide. It belongs to organisations capable of putting excellent creative people and excellent data people in the same room, with enough mutual respect to challenge one another.
At its best, measurement should not close the creative conversation.
It should begin with the next one.
