The ZiegenBock beer is going down smooth. Austin airport is a great place to wait for a flight. And, Ray’s Chuck Wagon at Asleep at the Wheel surely serves the finest briquette of beef in any airport. Dry and spicy. Country rock, courtesy of a SXSW (the locals say “South – By”) band helps me collect my thoughts about the day here.

This is the first time for me attending the show. And it will no doubt be the first of many. Austin is Portland meets Texas – hip, clean, smart and technology enabled with a little barbeque sauce. SXSW takes over town attracting (perhaps) hundreds of thousands to the festival.

 I spoke at session titled “Is too Much Math Killing Marketing” and debated the point with UK Ad Agency chief Mike Teasdale who took the position that it has. Mike’s a brilliant ad guy, fast, and with biting humor so I had to be careful not to get cut up in the knife fight on stage. In Bush country, I made my points – with rhetorical shock and awe (I had to work in a Bush-ism). Actually, we’re mostly in agreement but for the sake of a good show each of us labored (or laboured as Mike would say) to support a pure position – me arguing for left brain and Mike right.

 We didn’t really have any expectations – would this group come hear our thoughts at 9:30 in the morning on the last day of the show after four long nights of SXSW parties – the other reason people seem to go, or would we speak to a big empty room?  The answer came in loud in clear, that despite the time there was a morning thirst for an answer to the question, and we gave it our all in front of a full ballroom at the Hilton.

 So here’s my summary. One of Mike’s main points is that data becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions. He made fun of some of Eric Petersons‘ work around measuring visitor engagement. Now, I know and love Eric (we worked together in several firms – Web Trends and WebSideStory),  however  the audience made up mostly of interactive agency types, seemed to agree with Mike that it’s too complex.  He quoted Ogilvy and Dave Trott, “it’s better to be interesting and wrong than dull and right”.

 And the battle lines were drawn –  Math, Reason, Data, Left brain; English, Instinct, Imagination, Right brain. Too much math stops us from taking giant leaps, “it takes imagination to take a leap into the future”, he said. There where hoots from the crowd supporting the position.

 I started the counter point with the question “What is the Sound of Creativity When No One Can Hear It”? And quickly counter punched that the world today has changed as the internet provides us the tools and the empirical data to optimize. I followed up with the observation that, “we’re all becoming Content Engineers”. I’ve seen this movement for some years – one part creative director and what part data analyst.  Here’s what I said back in 2005 to ZDnet about the topic. This new breed needs to monitor, measure then maximize. Check out our SXSW presentation here.

 But the bottom line to my math is this, creativity without conversion = zero. And hopefully on that point I had a KO! Regardless, the debate stirred the pot and seems to have triggered interesting tweets – #toomuchmath, and blog posts. I would be curious to hear your thoughts?