The Missing Partner For Your Data Team Is Creative.
Data Scarcity: Organizations are drowning in data but lack the creativity to utilize it effectively.
Creative Integration: Incorporating data during the creative process can unlock unique marketing opportunities.
Structural Issues: Silos in organizations hinder collaboration between data teams and creative departments.
Unique Examples: Spotify's use of data showcases how creativity can transform operational insights into engaging marketing.
Organizational Change: To harness creativity with data, teams must build structures that encourage collaboration from the start.
Pull up your last three data dashboards. Now take a look at your competitor's. If you're honest, you probably can't tell which is which.
Sure, you continued building the capability. Every team does. And yes, the dashboards look authoritative and having more data at your fingertips leads to more insight—in theory.
What's become scarce isn't the data. It's knowing what to do with it creatively.
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Jason Carmel has been making this argument for years. He runs a team called Creative Data at VML, part of WPP. His title is less of a job description and more a motivation to bring the two departments together. Data and creativity in marketing isn't just a dream, it's a direct path to differentiation.
His case, which he laid out at the 2026 Web Summit Vancouver, is that most marketing organizations aren't making use of the data in a way that's meaningful.
Except, organizations now all have similar tooling, apply the same attribution logic, and receive virtually identical reports that no one has time to read. And the worst part is that the most interesting data is left completely untouched. This is the result of a creative instinct missing from the very rooms when data was being discussed.
This is the gap Carmel has spent over a decade trying to close, and it's worth asking yourself where your own organization sits in it.
When Volume Became a Liability
You've lived through this. The big data era lead to a race to nowhere. Organizations started competing on quantity rather than application. A million data points became ten million, then a hundred million, then 63 billion. But volume does not equal clarity.
Carmel says, "If data at that point was everywhere, it kind of also meant that it was nowhere." Too much of it, deployed without creative intention, disappears. In the same way ambient noise disappears from a room—it stops registering.
His read on what follows gets at something most post-mortems on big data miss. In that every abundance creates a new scarcity.
So when data became the commodity, creativity becomes the differentiator. While this shift happened roughly a decade ago, most organizations are still catching up to it. Maybe yours is too?
The Middle of the Process Was Empty
Most of data's history in marketing shows up before the work, and then again, afterwards. Teams use it pre-campaign, through predictive modeling and audience segmentation. Post-campaign, through attribution, reporting, optimization.
The creative process itself stayed a black box. Your data team dropped its analysis at the door and that was it—end of conversation.
What Carmel is building is a middle point. This looks like factoring in data visualization during ideation. Using generative data as creative input. Treating hyper-personalization as craft, not just targeting.
And what he refers to as "numerical surprise and delight", using real numbers to make someone laugh, feel something, or act. This is not just analytics. Instead, it's creative direction with a data foundation.
His origin story for this dates to a 2013 British Airways campaign, where a digital billboard tracked real-time flight paths overhead. They put an animated child on screen who followed each passing plane, naming the flight and destination as it went over. It was geometry, Carmel admits. "They know where the planes are flying, they know where that billboard is. The rest is just math. How hard can that be?"
This line came with an honest confession attached. His first reaction to the campaign was awe. And then—envy, admitting, "God damn it, I know exactly how they did that."
He wanted in. A few years later, Cannes Lions added a creative data award category, which told him the industry had caught up to what he'd been chasing. The data didn't make the British Airways idea happen. It stemmed from a creative person who then partnered the concept with data to make it real.
The Structural Problem You Aren't Naming
Spotify is the example everyone reaches for, and there are actually two worth knowing. Before Wrapped existed, Spotify ran an out-of-home campaign in New York pulling real listener data into billboards where messages like "Dear person who played a breakup song 42 times on Valentine's Day, what did you do?"
Carmel refers to this as being fascinating in its own right, the kind of thing "some person who looks like me had to pull in order to make this creative happen."
Then Spotify Wrapped scaled the same instinct, and Carmel reframes it in a way you should steal. In truth, "Spotify Wrapped is a CRM message." But functionally, it's a retention email.
What made it different wasn't the technology or the data access, which most large platforms have in some form. No, it was the decision to treat personal listening data as a gift back to the listener rather than a targeting mechanism. This is a creative decision. And, it happened to require data to execute.
Seeing the value of your data
So why isn't more of your marketing built this way? Carmel's states it plainly.
"There are two types of data in the world—operational and creative," he observes. "Operational is economics driven, saves time and money, whereas creative supercharges storytelling."
Every finance review defaults to the first, but the second approach requires a champion, and in most organizations, this person doesn't exist at the right level.
You probably know this firsthand if you've ever tried to defend a creative data line item against a performance marketing budget line.
There's also a structural piece that's harder to dismiss. Hybrid and distributed work removed the informal collisions where creative and data people used to bump into each other.
Large holding company structures create silos that take real effort to breach. Even well-intentioned teams often run data and creative on parallel tracks that never meet during the work itself. The gap isn't missing talent problem on your team, it often ties up to how your team is organized.
What Your Data Team Can Do
Carmel is honest about where data people go wrong.
"The big sin that we did as data people was to equate data with math," he says.
Nobody likes math, well most people don't. Convincing the rest of an organization that data was math made it sound smart, but that was the mistake. Data, as he urges, is words, emotion, history, desire and culture. And, all of it counts.
What he calls the fix is weird data sets where handing your creative team something free, strange, and specific, not as an answer but as a means to pique interest. He points to real places to find it.
Kaggle. Data.world. Reddit's r/datasets community. GitHub, which most people associate with code but which also hosts public data dumps nobody's thought to use.
Sourcing creative data
His favorites include wind data, the live location of the International Space Station, a list of 70,000 UFO sighting reports across the US, and a full timestamp log of every curse word and every bleeding moment in a Quentin Tarantino film.
The brief he gives every creative team he interviews is simple. If you had wind data, how would you sell a product? Where would you connect with a customer? Most ideas that come back are bad. That's fine. "I have 17 weird ideas, 14 are horrible, two don't make sense, but this one might work," is roughly how he describes the process working when it does.
The Tarantino data set is the one that produced something real. Carmel's team partnered with Kleenex and pulled movie sentiment data to determine which films had the highest "crying score."
The pricing logic followed from there where the higher the crying score, the cheaper the tissues. A creative person built that idea. The data team supplied the raw material. And neither side could have shipped it alone.
What This Means for You
The data infrastructure you've built over the last decade years is likely impressive. Between the volume, tooling, and analytics capability—you have a wealth of knowledge at your fingertips.
Now, you want to make space for your creative and data teams to work in tandem, tackling the problem at the same time. And the expectation is that result will be better than what either side would have reached on their own.
Aim to protect creative data work in budget conversations where operational data will always tell a cleaner ROI story. You'll also need to build team structures that pair data and creative people in close proximity instead of parallel tracks. And lastly, it means establishing that the most interesting output happens as part of process.
Carmel's case rests on the basis that every abundance creates a new scarcity. The organizations that accumulated the most data during the big data era now look remarkably similar to each other. What you do with it creatively, the thing that's actually become scarce, is yours to build or ignore.
What's Next?
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