I know a fair amount of people silently tilling creative fields, carefully cultivating their future while gently harvesting their past, who still dismiss data as a useful advertising tool. According to them, data doesn’t bring you any closer to the perfect solution, but only adds to general confusion. Pie charts with no prospect of pie and numbers with no hint at eliminating gambling debt. That’s not data’s problem. Data isn’t a stand-in for a live-in pastry chef, self-cloistering in your makeshift basement kitchen beneath immense piles of dough and flour, constantly sending word upstairs for more damn butter. Data isn’t a substitute for a naïve rich friend encouraging you to seek help through Gambler’s Anonymous. But data is the secret to the best ideas.
Unfortunately, our relationship with data eerily mirrors our relationship with farming. On some level, deep in the sunburnt recesses of our soul, we understand what a cash crop is. We were raised with the notion that good fertilizer spurs good growth. We named our children things like Hydroponica and Herbertcide. And scintillating conversations about manure often linger into the small hours of the morning.
Yet when we sit down for a meal of Beef Wellington, we don’t think about where the food came from. Instead we talk about Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington, and his heroism at the Battle of Waterloo. Sure, we give the wily Corsican his due, acknowledging how quickly the 100 days evaporated. Disappearing like the smoke from a Flemish cannon. How we all wish he’d just stayed on Elba for the rest of his days, drinking sweet wine, eating sweeter grapes and basking in that hot Mediterranean sun. What we don’t talk about is where the cow originated. Who raised it, who fed it, who named it, and who delivered it to our nauseatingly ornate plates. It seems immaterial. Is it?
The same mentality is true when we’re out and about digesting great ads. We comment on the copy or the visual. That’s the easy, sexy part. Ooooh, look at those words, will ya? Is that a pun? Is that a rhyme? I know there’s something clever in there somewhere. Not understanding the true value of data and how it informs every great work of art.
The minor pre-Impressionist, Joseph Saleté, known for little else besides his unequaled granular approach to composition, understood data long before it was in vogue. Seurat the Dotman wasn't even a pomme in his father's oeil. Saleté committed to recreating the natural world as it was. When drawing farms, he insisted on recreating each infinitesimal speck of dirt. Otherwise, why bother? Eventually, this obsession with data drove him completely mad, but not before producing a few masterpieces. Even then, burnout was a very real risk for creatives.
Art without data is like a sandwich without bread. It’s just a pile of meat that you really shouldn't eat with your hands.
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