Using Creativity and Data in Marketing

Introduction

I wanted to call this book Data vs Creativity: The battle for advertising’s soul. I thought it was punchy, provocative, something that would sit nicely in airport bookshops between Thinking, Fast and Slow and Harry Potter. But my publisher said no.

Not because it was inaccurate. But because it wouldn’t work well with SEO. The title needed to contain keywords that potential buyers would type into search engines. The title that I thought was clever and creative would be undiscoverable by the audience it was intended for. My mistake here was not to use data and creativity together. Ironically, given the content of this book, I ignored the data and relied on my intuition and feel. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, it’s just ...