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A recent Advertising Age article highlights the growing axis of power for marketing. It’s a mixture of art and science; right brain and left brain; creativity and insight. The article’s authors – Michael Fassnacht and James Shuttleworth of Draftfcb – use the term “artscience” to describe the concept. That word was originally coined by David Edwards, a professor of biomedical engineering at Harvard and author Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation.

Artscience relies on organizations that can break down old barriers to this traditionally dichotomous relationship between numbers and intuition, resulting in a beneficial merger of strategic thinking, creativity and data analytics to create bold, successful marketing campaigns for organizations. The world of marketing now creates reams of data and other information through transactions, inquiries, inventory analysis, etc. This information can be codified into knowledge and insights that empowers the creative team to turn out relevant, on-target advertising and other marketing. That was the original idea behind the account planning function at agencies, but today, because of the proliferation and depth of important marketing information, a data analyst is also needed to help give meaning to the numbers.

The AdAge article lists five steps organizations can employ to implement Artscience Marketing:

1) Get outside your box.
To get unconventional thinking, you have to hire unconventional thinkers. Get beneath vocations to avocations.
2) Inspire bi-polar conversations.
Review any marketing idea from a purely analytical perspective and then from a purely creative perspective. Don’t seek the common ground too soon.
3) Challenge people on two fronts.
Balance the drive of your organization to create “generalists” with the need for deep functional expertise. Every CMO needs to be a generalist, but he or she benefits greatly from a deep foundation in one particular marketing area, either the analytical or the planning field.
4) Raise the bar.
Elevate analytics and creative planning as must-have skills for all of the people on your team; too often both areas are treated as specialist fields that only other specialists need to deal with.
5) Create the right environment.
There is inherent tension in artscience marketing. To get the most out of it, everyone needs to be comfortable with the messes it sometimes creates, and be clear that the end product is what is valued.