Technology and data are creating new forms of storytelling, and marketing teams that find the most creative ways to leverage these tools are often the most successful. Finding ways to invest in creativity is a challenge marketers will be facing moving forward, according to Gerry Murray, research manager with IDC’s CMO Advisory Service.
“We don’t tend to put as much formal time and resource commitment to the creativity piece of the puzzle. We tend to take it for granted or we take the best and the brightest and put them into an innovation center. Both of those are good, but mot good enough for the modern marketer—it’s too complex, too dynamic and the customer is changing too quickly,” Murray, who presented at the MarTech Convention in San Francisco last month says.
Murray points to a recent campaign by Domino’s Pizza in Australia as a great example of leveraging 
technology in a creative way to drive a successful social marketing campaign. The Domino’s Pizza Mogul app allowed users to create their own signature pizza creations, share them across their social network and actually get a part of the profit from every pizza sold.
The campaign featured a leader board for the most successful moguls, and the top five scorers have sold a total of 60,000 pizza combined and have been paid a commission of almost 90,000 Australian dollars.
“There is no higher level of customer engagement. These people are developing the product, they’re doing the marketing and they’re out there selling,” Murray says.
There are several techniques marketers can leverage to find new ways to engage audiences creatively, Murray says. Marketers should question conventional thinking whenever possible to help spark creative thinking, and try to synthesize perspectives through data and analytics, and identifying targets across channels.
“You want to continually drive the analytics IQ of your organization, and one of the best ways of doing that is to have the team get together and share what tools and data sets they’re using, what models they’re building, and share that practice,” Murray says.
Sometimes placing creative constraints marketers can yield interesting results, as well.
“Creative constraints prevent people from solving the same old problem in the same old way,” Murray says.
For example, imaging approaching a content marketing campaign without using the term or the concept of search, but rather focusing on creating content, understanding the audience and delivering the content in a way that is good enough to find the audience without them searching for it.
“How you solve that is going to be different based on your team and technology, but it’s a wonderful conversation to have, even if you can’t get to the end. Because along the path of that line of thinking, you may come up with some really interesting ideas that you can apply to your mobile content marketing strategy and make it stand out to dazzle your customers,” Murray says.
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