fruitless debate as to whether we are artists or scientists rages on. Time out, please. The answer is that we are both. The science of advertising works because of the art of advertising. Binet and Field show, definitively in a study of 880 campaigns, that it is creative 2 campaigns that outsell, on every business metric. Of course, these findings circle back beautifully to the issue of creative awards. In Cannes, as a jury you are inclined to award creative campaigns. In so doing, Tim pointed out, “juries have been criticized – but their instincts are sound: …emotive campaigns are much more likely to strengthen the brand. They do better for the client. They deserve to win”. Not only that, but, in the digital age, their fame is amplified as a result of social buzz, creating a positive cycle of advocacy and excitement. In a study of Cannes award winners, their campaigns were shown to be 11 times more effective than work that had not been awarded. Back to David Ogilvy. His first work in advertising was not to write an ad at all but to perform a consulting project. The report he generated is interesting for the pungency of its conclusions, so trenchant indeed that they resulted in Mather and Crowther being fired from the business (the famous work which later emerged came after a re-hiring). However uncomfortable the findings might have been to the client, they are rooted in observation, in evidence, in hypothesis – all the techniques which a little later led to David working for George Gallup as a researcher. But, 25 years later, in 1955, it was the same Ogilvy who attacked the “hard facts” school of his friend and rival, Rosser Reeves, the founder of Ted Bates, in a famous 3 speech in Chicago , and laid out a manifesto for brand image advertising. Suddenly he was joining the debate of what creativity is, and what it is for, from, apparently, the opposite end of the spectrum. Or course, in reality there was nothing contradictory in his evolved position. It simply reflects the enduring dualism about creativity, that it is neither purely an art form whose exact workings in the marketplace cannot be forensically proven nor is it a rigorous science susceptible to explanation only by rules and proof through numbers.