10/22/2010 07:09:55 AM 
For many, this was the chance to bask in the headlights of fame as advertising brought your brand and your job to a national audience. If you got it right, you would be noticed and talked about, not just your brand, but you the marketer.
In this world ,there was an uneven distribution of creative talent, the advertising got all the attention and some areas got nothing at all. In such a world, those other areas of the business that lacked the creative magic dust, could and would look dull and uninteresting to those with it. At an extreme, the scientists in the R&D labs rarely got to hire a top flight agency creative team to present their meeting findings, similarly the Accounting Department couldn't do the same at their financial meetings with the board. Meanwhile, the marketing and advertising department could look way better than anyone else and bask in the glory that was their advertising, providing it was good!
Since there's been a democratization of creative technology and costs have come down rapidly, other departments have been elevating their game and making their stuff sexier. Data is the talk of the town right now, it's the thing that agencies are looking to provide and clients want to showcase their ROI, but it's not sexy and it's very hard to bring creativity into it, unless you have a data visualization wizard on your team.
That said, I found this video from Gatorade really interesting, it's all about one facet of their marketing department- the social media measurement team, this could be presented in a really dry and boring way and have nothing to do with the energy of the brand. However, in this little film where they explain in a topline way what they do, they brand themselves "Mission Control" is way more interesting than "Social Media Monitoring" and importantly, they show not just how they're essential for the business, but how they connect to the brand.
Data is obviously the area where creativity can have a huge impact, but there are so many other areas of business that are going to benefit from and will need to have creative firepower, to bring their skills and stories to life. This is not just a story about democratization of creativity, but in an era of fading and faded attention spans, everyone, irrespective of department, needs a creative way to bring their stories to life.
Posted by Ed Cotton
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