Driving Creativity with Data — WistiaFest 2015

Chris Savage, Co-Founder of Wistia, is passionate about creating a more creative business. With the value of creativity rising, creativity for marketers is more important than ever. Attention is a scarce resource in any saturated market so when attention is gained, it must be held. Savage found you can hold people’s attention with creativity.

In a smaller organization, it’s easier to have more chaos for creativity. When you’re bigger, you need more organization and process, making it harder to take creative risks. However, you can measure more data when you’re bigger. Scaling creativity is a challenge, but Savage paints a creative approach to data. Between tracking everything and tracking nothing, you should aim for somewhere in between. The goal is to feel confident you’re headed in the right direction. As a big organization awashed in data, it’s about finding the right data that will help support future creative risk taking.

“Between tracking everything and tracking nothing, you should aim for somewhere in between.”

Proactively tracking things giving insight about the pay-off of creative risks will not only put you on a path for more risk-taking, but also build your team’s confidence. To start taking creative risks, find an environment that fosters creativity, and remember to give yourself experimentation headroom. A creative environment includes hiring the right people, and experimentation is the space where failure lives.

Failure has real value to lower your stakes a little bit. Savage says if you don’t have room for failure you’re probably not putting yourself in a position to take creative risks.

Creativity helps differentiate you and hold the attention you’re trying to get. Embrace measurement and try not to obsess over success or failure of individual projects. Watch Savage’s presentation to learn more about driving creativity with data and see how others are scaling their creativity.