At the judging session for The Drum Awards for Marketing US, held 63 floors above Manhattan in Stagwell’s World Trade Center HQ, a trio of industry leaders came to a surprising conclusion: data – long blamed for the death of creativity – might just be the thing that brings humanity back to marketing.
“Let’s stop focusing on the risks of AI,” said Michael Treff, CEO of Code and Theory, who as a Stagwell agency was hosting the event, “And start focusing on the opportunities.”
It was a sharp turn away from the usual narratives of automation panic and machine-driven blandness. But Treff’s point, echoed by his fellow panellists – Victoria Lozano, CMO of Crayola, and Jonathan Harrop, VP of marketing and comms for wholesale trading at Citi (speaking in a personal capacity) – was this: used wisely, data can make marketing more human, not less.
Rather than stripping the soul …