Jamie Mollart, Director of Advertising and Marketing Agency, Rock Kitchen Harris, is calling all creative folk to arms in a world of cold, hard stats.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently; how does an advertising or marketing agency maintain the focus on creativity in a world of monitoring?

A world where we can measure eye movement, cookies can follow our targets around the web, where we can have 0845 numbers for every piece of collateral, where we can spend hours trawling through Google analytics. Where the temptation is to sell our work only through ROI rather than the good old fashioned big idea.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not questioning the value of these things. They are integral to our industry, give it the facts and gravitas that we desperately needed. But the temptation to lead the pitch with them is getting stronger. Why sell with your ideas when you can sell with the tangible?

Validation vs. variety

Of course, it makes sense to focus on the tangible. Lets face it, we're in the selling game, and our clients are too. They want to know we can back up what we're saying with results for them.

But remember the days when advertising was a black art? When we couldn't show analytics goals and categorically prove that our campaigns worked. In the days when people had to cut out coupons and bring them in and we told our clients that this wasn't a reliable metric.

Back then the idea was everything. The moment when you'd presented your new campaign idea and the smile crept over your client's face and you knew you had gold. The moment when the creative came back to you for the first time and you knew, instinctively, that it was right.

You could argue all this technology has stolen a bit of the magic.

When I was young...

Remember why you fell in love with advertising in the first place - it wasn't because of a spreadsheet.

It was because of the creativity, because of the black art, because of the magic.

I blame TV. Ironic I know. But I blame the plethora of design programmes.

They've made creativity commonplace. The norm. What people expect. 

Creative thinking is the given now. It's the proof of the results that sells.

And this is probably correct. We're asking people to part with a large part of their company budget and it's our job to get that back for them and then some. 

What I'm saying, I think, is that we, the industry need to remember why we do what we do. Remember what makes us all tick. The creative thought. The big idea. That ethereal genius idea. And then use all the cool technology to prove that we're right. 

Which we knew we were all along anyway.