The creative future of marketing depends on the data foundations behind it

What DMWF reminded me about creativity, community, AI, and the marketing data behind it all

Across DMWF, there was a clear sense that marketing is becoming both more creative and more accountable. Brands are thinking harder about how they show up in culture, how they build communities, how they work with creators, how they use AI, and how they create experiences that people actually want to engage with.

That part is exciting. It is why many of us work in marketing in the first place.

But as I listened to sessions from brands like Charlotte Tilbury, SharkNinja, Channel 4, Les Mills, Lush, Krispy Kreme, and Milk Makeup, one theme kept coming back to me. We spend a lot of time talking about the visible parts of marketing. The content. The campaigns. The creators. The brand moments. The AI use cases. The community building. The big creative ideas.

We spend less time talking about the infrastructure underneath them.

That is the part we need to own more clearly as marketers and marketing leaders. Not because governance, taxonomy, tracking, naming conventions, and measurement flows are the most exciting topics in the room. They are not. But because they are what make more exciting marketing possible.

The better our foundation is, the more room we create for creativity.

Followers are no longer the north star

One of the strongest takeaways from the Charlotte Tilbury session was the idea that followers are no longer the metric to build around. Many views now come from people who do not follow the brand. Discovery is more fluid, platform-driven, and content-led than before.

That changes how brands need to think about success.

The question is no longer simply, “Did we gain followers?” It is more useful to ask whether people recognise the brand, whether the content feels relevant, and whether it holds attention. Recognition, relevance, and retention are far more meaningful indicators than follower count alone.

This also changes the role of creative. Brand recognition cannot depend only on a logo or a campaign line. It has to be visible in the way a brand behaves across formats, platforms, creators, and communities. The strongest brands are recognisable even when the format changes.

That was clear in the way Charlotte Tilbury approaches platform-specific content. The same idea does not simply get repurposed everywhere. Entertainment, aspiration, education, and elevation can show up differently depending on the audience and the platform.

The challenge is that this makes measurement harder. If content is built differently across platforms, if many views come from non-followers, and if success is about recognition, relevance, and retention, then marketers need a stronger way to define and connect those signals.

Views alone are not enough. Engagement alone is not enough. The real question is whether the brand can understand what those signals mean and connect them to something the wider business can trust.

Creator marketing needs stronger data ownership

The creator economy came up in several ways throughout the event. Creators are increasingly part of how brands reach audiences, build trust, and create culture around products. In some categories, the creator is almost becoming the sales floor. The feed is the storefront, the creator is the human layer, and the content becomes part of the transaction.

That is powerful. But it also creates a measurement challenge.

If creator activity is spread across platforms, livestreams, affiliate links, short-form video, paid amplification, discount codes, QR codes, landing pages, and social engagement, then how does a brand create one global view of what is working?

More importantly, who owns that data?

A platform may give you views. A creator may give you reach. An affiliate system may give you sales. A social platform may give you engagement. But if those data points are not connected through a clear taxonomy, governed links, consistent tracking, and shared definitions, the brand is left with fragments.

That is where creator marketing can become difficult for enterprise teams. It looks modern and culturally relevant on the surface, but behind the scenes it can be hard to understand performance consistently across markets, campaigns, creators, and business outcomes.

For marketers, the question is not whether creator marketing matters. It clearly does. The question is whether we are building the data and measurement flows needed to understand it properly.

AI should enhance the team, not replace the foundation

AI was also part of the conversation, as expected. What stood out was the more practical tone. The stronger examples were not about replacing teams. They were about using AI to enhance work, speed up analysis, support content production, and help teams identify signals faster.

That is the right direction. AI can be incredibly useful when it helps marketers work faster and think more clearly.

But AI also raises a familiar question: what data is it using?

If a team downloads data from multiple platforms and uses AI to identify patterns, the quality of the output still depends on the quality of the input. If the data is fragmented, inconsistent, or platform-dependent, AI may help summarise the problem faster, but it does not automatically solve it.

This is where the AI conversation in marketing needs to become more grounded. AI can support creative work, performance analysis, content testing, and customer understanding. But it still needs reliable data structures underneath. Without that, marketers risk building AI workflows on top of data they do not fully own, govern, or trust.

The irony is that AI is often framed as the exciting part of marketing transformation. But the organisations that benefit most from AI will likely be the ones that have already done the less visible work: defining data ownership, standardising campaign structures, validating tracking, and making sure performance signals can be interpreted across teams and systems.

Community is more than interaction

The Channel 4 and Mums in Marketing discussions brought another important point into focus: community is not just a marketing tactic. It is part of how brands build trust, loyalty, advocacy, and resilience.

Community is often talked about in terms of engagement, but engagement on its own is too limited. A comment, like, or share does not automatically mean a brand has created a meaningful relationship. Community needs insight, not just interaction.

The strongest point for me was that community often starts inside the business. How a team talks to each other, how people onboard, how they understand the brand, and how they show up externally all shape the way a brand is experienced by the outside world.

That has a real impact on marketing. If the people inside the organisation do not understand the brand story, it becomes harder to build advocacy outside of it. If employees are not confident sharing the brand, customers and partners are unlikely to do the work for you.

This matters for B2B as much as B2C. In complex markets, community can create proximity. It can give people a reason to trust the brand before they are ready to buy. It can help customers feel part of something rather than simply targeted by something.

But again, this raises a measurement question. If community creates trust, advocacy, loyalty, product feedback, retention, and resilience, how do we measure it without reducing it to vanity engagement?

That is where marketing needs better definitions. Community cannot be measured only by surface-level interaction. It needs to be connected to behaviour, relationship depth, retention, influence, and business outcomes.

Brand is built through a thousand small gestures

The Les Mills session captured something many marketers know, but often struggle to operationalise: a brand is not built through one campaign. It is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time.

A brand is the product of a thousand small gestures.

That idea matters because it connects brand to operations. Every campaign, sales conversation, product experience, social post, landing page, event, customer interaction, and internal handover either strengthens or weakens the brand.

This is why alignment between sales, marketing, and product is so important. The strongest brands do not only have a strong external message. They have the same story, the same evidence, and the same energy across the organisation.

For B2B marketers, that is especially relevant. B2C experiences have already trained B2B buyers to expect relevance, clarity, speed, and consistency. Buyers do not experience a brand in a straight line. They move through looping journeys, multiple touchpoints, peer influence, content, events, sales conversations, and digital experiences.

That makes consistency harder, but also more important.

It also means that marketing cannot think about brand separately from data. If the brand promise is one thing, but campaign tracking, reporting, segmentation, and customer journeys tell a different story, then the organisation loses clarity. Teams may be working hard, but not from the same evidence base.

That is where the operational side of marketing becomes strategic. Taxonomy is not just a data exercise. It is how the organisation creates a shared language for what it is doing, why it matters, and how it performs.

Retention needs better measurement, not just better campaigns

The panel with Lush and Krispy Kreme brought the conversation back to retention. In a fragmented and competitive market, customer retention becomes a critical focus. Attracting new customers is expensive, and in many mature categories, growth depends on understanding how to keep customers engaged, how to win back lapsed customers, and how to identify the right offer for the right segment.

That sounds straightforward, but it is difficult to do well without good data.

Retention strategies depend on knowing who came back, why they came back, what triggered the behavior, which segment they belong to, and what value was created. Senior leadership will eventually ask what the business got back from the activity. Marketing needs to be able to answer that question clearly.

This is where easy measurement matters. Not simplistic measurement, but usable measurement. Teams need a clear way to connect activity to behaviour and behaviour to commercial impact.

The same is true for events, affiliate marketing, creator activity, QR codes, short links, social campaigns, and community programs. If these activities are not tracked consistently, they become harder to defend, even when they are valuable.

Digital scales, events convert, but the connection matters

Another strong idea from the event was that digital scales, while events convert. That feels especially relevant in B2B.

Digital activity helps create reach, consistency, education, and always-on visibility. Events create proximity, trust, conversation, and momentum. The challenge is that many organisations still measure these worlds separately.

A person may see content, interact with a post, attend an event, scan a QR code, visit a landing page, speak to sales, and later return through another channel. If the data behind those touchpoints is fragmented, the organisation struggles to understand the journey.

For marketers, this creates a familiar problem. The strategy recognises that journeys are connected, but the data often does not. We talk about looping journeys, community, content, creators, events, and personalised relevance, but the measurement setup is often still channel-specific and disconnected.

That gap matters. If marketing wants to prove its role in revenue, retention, customer experience, and brand growth, then the connective tissue has to be stronger.

The less glamorous work creates space for better marketing

My biggest takeaway from DMWF was not that marketing needs more creativity, more AI, more content, more creators, or more community. We already know those things matter.

The bigger takeaway is that marketers need to take more ownership of the foundations that allow those things to work.

We like to spend hours talking about the cool parts of marketing. The big ideas. The creative formats. The social moments. The AI use cases. The community plays. The experiences people remember.

But the less glamorous work matters just as much. Governance. Taxonomy. Tracking. Naming conventions. Measurement flows. Data ownership. Validation. These are not side issues. They are what allow marketing teams to move faster, prove impact, and create more room for the work that actually feels exciting.

When the foundation is weak, marketers spend too much time fixing, explaining, reconciling, and defending. When the foundation is strong, teams have more space to create, test, learn, and build.

That is where Accutics fits into the conversation. Not as a replacement for creativity, strategy, or community, but as part of the structure that helps marketing teams protect those things. When marketing data is standardized, validated, and connected from the start, teams can spend less time cleaning up the basics and more time building the experiences, content, and customer relationships that make a brand matter.

The future of marketing will be creative, community-driven, AI-supported, and increasingly accountable. But to get there, we need to own the boring stuff too.

Because the boring stuff is what gives marketing the confidence to do the exciting stuff better.

‍