Proactive Strategic Frameworks Enabling Actionable Insights

As a copywriter, one of the things that has always fried my ass is the assumption on the part of a certain type of account person or planner that I need them to hold my hand or I'll wind up wandering out into traffic and getting myself hurt.

The nonsense goes like this: creatives are silly little emotional children who can't be trusted to think straight and need grown-ups to show them the shining path.

It's all complete and utter bullshit. I've been in the ad business for over 200 years and without question the best strategists I've met have been creatives. Better than planners. Better than MBAs. Better than CMOs.

Of course, not every art director is a better strategist than every planning director. But on average, really good creatives are far better at strategy than the people who have the word strategy in their job descriptions.

Which makes a piece of junk I read in AdAge recently even more infuriating. The piece was called "Meet Today's Analytic Creative." It rehashes all the usual ignorant nonsense about creatives being right-brain retards. But the difference is that this thing was written by someone who calls himself a chief creative officer. 

The column was nothing more than a jargon-drenched self-promotion piece disguised as a news article. That AdAge would print such baloney is a comment on the pathetic state of our industry and the people who cover it.

Here's a glimpse at the preposterous nonsense in this guy's article:

"The ability to develop inspired, right-brain solutions within a strategic framework of actionable intelligence is the creative currency of a data-driven age..".

I would like to nominate the above sentence for a "Buzzword Bingo" lifetime achievement award.

"Recently, our analytics group started partnering proactively with creative groups..."

Good job. If there's one thing we have to put a stop to it's retroactive partnering.

"..marketers applying analytic techniques to digital data have been rewarded with a growing bounty of insights."

Really? Digital data? I'd like to know exactly what kind of data is not digital?

"The result was the development of a proprietary tool that packages data in an intuitive, visual way enabling creatives to manipulate information themselves to provide actionable insights."

I got your proprietary tool right here. And, by the way, do you really think it's wise to allow creatives to manipulate information all by themselves? Aren't you afraid they may put someone's eye out?

Here's a little tip for the poor bastards who are stuck working for this meatball. Ignore all this bullshit and try to find something interesting to say about the product.