This post was originally published in French and in a slightly different format on the Infopresse website.

The rise of technology and the emergence of global conversations may signal the end of this Don Draper cliché, beyond any doubt about himself, nonchalantly throwing focus group reports and market study to the garbage bin in order to let his imagination roam free.

David Ogilvy, 50 years ago, at the height of Madison Avenue's glory, wrote that advertising was an inexact science. In other words, he was telling us that we could only trust him, but not too much. That through trial and error, with a hint of experience and good taste, had to be earned. The creative process, barred any quantitative input, is more art than science.

That said, isn't the ability to talk to every consumer individually, to find the right words to address him or her, the ultimate dream of the ad man? Is it not the dream that Jon Hamm relentlessly pursues outside the walls of his office: to woo each and every one?
 

A stellar panel organized by Merkle and moderated by its Chief Creative Office Mark A. Weninger explored this idea that the massive data sets that we are able to generate, aggregate and analyze today may be the key to merging the science of marketing to the art of advertizing.

A growing number (and proportion) of successful campaigns, both in terms of creative genius and of return on investment, stem from a refined, often in real-time, exploitation of big data. Even in the world of fashion – the last bastion of opinion, according to Weninger – is jumping on the bandwagon.

The new economy does not announce the end of the big idea as much as our archaic idea of the big idea. Brené Brown suggested that good stories could well just be data with a soul. The problem is not the data – there are vast quantities of it already – it's the talent needed to make sense of it and interpret it creatively.

Tomorrow's ad men and women will continue to woo us with their creative talents, rain or shine. But when you see only a sliver of the sky, the weather always changes rapidly.

f. & co is attending Advertising Week in New York as social reporters for the Association des agences de publicité du Québec (AAPQ) and as part of the montréal.ad delegation. Follow our meanderings and trendspotting on Twitter at #RDVAdWeek and #AWX. Find all AdWeek-related posts on blog,fandco.ca here.