Now, more than ever, creativity matters. Advertisers are under increasing pressure as budgets are tightened and agencies are expected to do more but often for less.

At the recent WARC Creativity in Advertising Conference, Chairman Rory Sutherland, Executive Creative Director and Vice-Chairman, OgilvyOne London, warned us of the dangers of allowing the creative industry to be ruled by the calculator and the spreadsheet.

In these harsh economic times there is an inherent bias against the generation of creativity - brilliant ideas can be born of an afternoon and result in millions of pounds' worth of real value or it can take weeks to generate a mediocre idea.

However, there is no value calculation for this process - it is a false economy to reduce the environment for ideas generation in favour of cost accountability and ROI.

There were a number of recurring themes throughout the day, but three were most prominent. First, the traditional "persuasion" model of advertising is broken. Second, the industry is becoming data rich but insight poor. Third, the structure and process of creating advertising has changed little since the days of