Techs hiring creatives to embrace the creative world

A big part of this blog is encouraging marketers to bring technologists fully into their teams as a way to grok the use of technology in modern marketing.

A couple of days ago, AdAge ran an article — Why Facebook Is Hiring Ad Agency Creatives — that illustrates an example of the inverse: a technology company hiring creatives to better embrace the possibilities with the creative community.

During a session at the 4A’s Transformation Conference, Facebook’s VP of Global Marketing Solutions, Carolyn Everson, answered questions on why Facebook was hiring several leading agency creatives, such as Mark D’Arcy.

It isn’t because they’re looking to start their own agency.

“Creatives like talking to creatives,” Everson said. “We need enough people at Facebook who can sit across the table from a creative leader and engage in a conversation about what the possibilities are.”

“Mark has hired a handful of people around the world so we can have a conversation with the Jeff Benjamins [chief creative officer of JWT] of the world and chief creative officers.”

Given that Facebook is arguably the epitome of a modern tech company — Mark Zuckerberg is the champion of The Hacker Way — I find Facebook’s approach here to be an admirable endorsement of (a) the differentiated value that tech and creative specialists each bring to the table and (b) the enormous potential from their integrated collaboration.

Everson urged the audience to look at how Facebook deals with developers to get a sense of how it would like to deal with ad agencies.

Does your marketing team have a vision of how to deal with technologies and technologists?

P.S. On the topic of creative and technical commingling, Tim Suther of Acxiom published an article on CMO.com earlier this week — Mad Men Meet Their Match: Math Men — that makes the case for the collaboration between left-brain (tech) and right-bain (creative) professionals. Includes plenty of clever nods to famous advertising slogans, such as:

“While diamonds are forever, mass advertising is not. Marketing science alone won’t be its replacement. Combined, however, the art and science of marketing are ‘two great tastes that taste great together.'”

Sounds g-r-r-r-eat!

P.P.S. Is the inverse of a marketing technologist a technology creative?