Les Guessing's Linkedin Analytics

I believe the future of ad creative involves creative people mining and concepting straight from data. By going through so many layers, data often gets filtered and lost based on a Planner's intuition and bias. That's not wrong, it's just the process of arriving at a single-minded message. (It's almost always a bad idea to throw away data.) (I genuinely appreciate the contribution of Planners & Strategists and have worked with a number of them writing strategies – I love it. But as the era of 72 zettabytes of data expands, it becomes more limited.) A reductionist view of advertising says that all ads can be thought of ultimately as a joke, a poem, or information. Most Planners & Strategists are people who have never written an ad (or a joke). And yet their job is to give creatives insight into what would make a good ad (or joke). NO comedian would ever hire somebody who had never written a joke, to write setups for jokes. But in many ways, that’s the ad system currently in place. By concepting straight from data, creatives can bring a ton of ideas into the strategizing process. Be honest, how many times have you worked on projects where the creatives come up with ideas that aren’t directly connected to the creative brief, so the agency then backs into the creative strategy from that work? Why not operationalize that? I may be the only Emmy-winning Copywriter / Creative Director in the world using Artificial Intelligence (Natural Language Processing / Machine Learning / Deep Learning) along with Python programming and tools techniques from Data-driven Journalism, to turn raw data into advertising strategies, concepts and content. I couldn't do that without having developed a lot of creative intuition over the last couple of decades. I was Creative Director on Acura National Brand and NFL on Fox for 2 years. I’m a talented and proven writer (with over 20 years as a Freelance copywriter, at nearly every ad agency in LA). I'm also a mashup of a lot of stuff... programming (Python, SQL {some R), Cinematography (UCLA), Photography, Editing (Premiere Pro), Motion Graphics (After Effects/Adobe Animate cc, Photoshop) and some Web Development (Sketch) (Express, Node, MongoDB) and (Flask, HTML, CSS, jQuery, Bootstrap) – the gestalt of which allows me to be a great plug-and-play Creative/Data/Content service for ad agencies, marketers, startups and in-house organizations.