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?

We've pilfered a great bit of content from the Guardian that we thought was too good not to share.

How do you go about briefing your marketing agency? Are you committing some deadly briefing sins? Improve your briefs with George Foster, who, as Founder and Creative Director of Integrated Design and Marketing Agency, Gravitas spills the beans.

People often ask me how to brief a design or marketing agency.

Last week, we asked a select group of marketing agencies to comment on the Google AdWords Campaign update and how they forsaw it affecting the industry.

Here, Neil Brown, Head of Search and Conversion at Comms and Marketing Agency, Cogent Elliott shares his views on the changes.

Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects are recording over a 450% increase in qualified leads, says Garry Davis of Digital Marketing Agency, Grow Online Marketing, specialists in Marketing Automation. Here he tells you all you need to know.

Marketing automation can bring a host of significant benefits to organisations keen to target their marketing more accurately – but too many companies don’t yet know about this exciting new technology.

What is the definition of marketing automation?

Marketing automation is a term for software that is used to capture the data of the people who interact with your brand online and then nurtures those leads until they are ready to be converted into sales.

The way marketing automation software works is to record the email addresses of everybody who fills out a form on your website and then by ‘tagging’ all their other activity, from the pages they look at on your website through to their engagement with your social media profiles. Using this technology, marketing automation software can build a more comprehensive picture than ever before of how people interact with your brand. It’s the next step that makes marketing automation software so exciting, however, because it sends follow-up content to those leads based on their individual habits.

For example: a travel agency sends an email to its database containing a pdf attachment of its latest brochure. Joe Smith is one of the recipients and clicks through to open the brochure. He’s interested in holidays in Greece, so he goes straight to that page. He has previously visited the travel agency’s Facebook page. The software has tracked all of this, and is able to send him automatic follow-up messages containing offers on holidays in Greece, and incentives to become a fan on Facebook. The travel agency is communicating with Joe based on his actions and preferences, thus achieving a unique balance between inbound and outbound marketing.

The marketing world has been shaken by a controversial debate with one question at the epicentre: Do marketing agencies place too much emphasis on creativity and not enough on achieving return on investment? According to 78% of CEOs, they don't...

Since the report was published on July 11th there has been a backlash response from marketing agencies and other influential bodies in the industry slamming the claims. Their group disapproval is proof that not only marketing agencies but also CEOs believe that creativity and ROI is not an either or decision.

Truly creative and original concepts have little or no backing research to support the strategy pitch due to the experimental nature of the ideas. It is this detail that rings alarm bells for CEOs who are used to being reassured their investment will be well spent with a presentation of hard data and evidence to ensure an airtight profitable strategy.

Integrated Vs specialist: its the marketing agency debate that colours FindGood towers many an afternoon – but what should you base your marketing agency search and selection on and what do you need to consider?

There are many pros and cons for each side and naturally, the scales are constantly swaying.

Did you miss Marketing Week Live 2013? We've asked one resident of this year's 'Ask the Experts' Zone, Brett Sammels to give us the inside scoop.

Brett is Client Services Director at full service advertising and marketing agency, LAW Creative.