The Art of Asking: How the Right Data Questions Lead to Creative Breakthroughs

Creative and data teams are increasingly working in tandem, having shed any perceived animosity in favour of harmonious cohabitation. Maintaining harmony, however, is no easy task and it often starts with asking the right question.

What is the right question in this context? Is there more than one? We decided to reach out to creatives and agency data experts to learn more about how curiosity and strategic interrogation of data can lead to more powerful ideas. We wanted to know what the most useful questions to ask of a dataset are and how one spots insights that spark a creative leap. Most of all, we asked for examples where the collaboration between creative and data minds resulted in unexpected, original, and effective work.

Below, our contributors discuss the difference good datasets make, why insight is not always easy to come by, and advise to look for – not avoid – tension and contradictions for unexpected creative solutions.

Megan Fath
US chief design officer at Deloitte Digital

Posing the right inquiry is certainly part of the magic – crafting a question that is inquisitive rather than leading or assumes an answer. But just as valuable are the questions the creative and research teams use after they’ve collected their data, when they’re analysing what their datasets reveal. The data often elicits an observation regarding a pattern in behaviour or understanding. The insight that unlocks the fuel for creativity and innovation is looking deeper at this pattern and asking why. Why is this the perception? Why do people hold on to this behaviour?

The other post data collection question I pose to the team analysing the data is, what’s missing? What did we think or hope the data would tell us that it’s not answering? This can often be the most telling insight: What is the data not saying? This gap may reveal a true difference or disconnect in the consumer mindset. I find this particularly true in our user experience work. Our research often uncovers consumers’ unarticulated needs – what they haven’t said or haven’t been able to convey about what would make their experiences with brands easier or more fulfilling. In these moments of ‘missing’ information is often where we’re able to be the most creative because we’ve found something we didn’t know we were looking for.

Tim Walsh
UK head of strategy at Momentum Worldwide

The best ideas don’t start with answers, they start with questions (or something like that!).

There’s more data flying around than ever. Dashboards, reports, benchmarks, performance charts. Everyone’s drowning in it. But actual insight? That’s something else. As we know insight doesn’t sit in a spreadsheet waiting to be plucked out. It almost always lives in the tension, the contradiction, the thing no one’s looked at properly. The key is to treat data as the starting point, not the finish line. It’s not there to give you the answer, it’s there to help you ask a better question. Why do people trust playlists more than product reviews? What does value mean now that everything feels throwaway? What do people want that brands keep missing? Add AI into the mix and process and the need to ask better questions has only become more important.

We’re suddenly not just creating from scratch anymore (did we ever?), we’re prompting, directing, shaping. It’s a little less ‘what can we make?’ and a little more ‘what can we guide and mould into something meaningful?’ Because whether it’s data, tech or an idea, what you get out depends entirely on what you put in. Better questions lead to sharper work, work that connects, work that sticks. So next time you’re handed a pile of data, don’t just ask what it says. Ask what it could be.

Rosie Gentile
EVP at FCB/SIX practice lead, North America

The key to unlocking creative breakthroughs is deeply understanding your audience as people, not just demographics. Explore their motivations, values, and beliefs. What is important to them? How do they make decisions and what factors do they prioritise? Explore a wide array of attributes, including interests, passion points, lifestyle, where they live, and media habits, to paint a comprehensive picture.

Spotting the insight that sparks a creative leap involves looking for unexpected patterns, connections, and tensions within this rich audience data. Understanding the person and the consumer: buying behaviors, shopping habits, brand affinities – and combining that with a strategic learning agenda focused on your brand’s context (vertical engagement, consumer needs, and competition) will guide you towards those pivotal insights.

To give an example, BMO, when faced with the challenge of trying to connect with younger generations that actively ignore them, had to find a way to gain a deeper understanding of their mindset. How do we get this audience to engage? What matters to them, and where do they spend their time?

In partnership with FCB/SIX, the team identified that gaming has become a major part of younger generations’ social lives and digital lifestyles. So, BMO became the first financial institution to launch a channel on Twitch, the world’s number one streaming platform. Streams have accumulated over 15,000 hours of watched time and over 37,000 engagements. What started as a three-month activation is now well into year three and has become a new media channel for the bank with streams sponsored across all lines of business (banking, lending, insurance, and investing). This approach delivers a highly engaged audience and is considered by the bank to be its most valuable branch. BMO NXT LVL proves banks can thrive within gaming culture by reimagining their approach.

This example emphasises that when you ask the right questions, and explore what drives the consumer most, the results will transcend the expected and lead to strong business impact for brands.

Zak Moy
VP of creative at The Sasha Group, a VaynerX Company

At The Sasha Group, views and impressions are our KPI for social content. They’re our first sign that says, “there’s something here, we’ve struck some cultural truth.” It’s how interest-based algorithms work on the big social platforms. But to make that blip on the radar actionable, we have to look beyond just numbers and ask, “What does this say about the people engaging with this content?” That’s where qualitative comments start to shape hypotheses. This is jet fuel for creatives and strategists.

While we can’t reduce every human truth into numbers, at least not yet, at some point, creatives and their strategic partners need to look up from the spreadsheets, make very educated guesses, and leap using their gut and lived experiences as their new dataset.
If impression counts are markers on a map of what has consumers’ attention, then our curiosity and intuition are the compass to impactful, creative ideas. I’ll share an example from our client, Celestial Seasonings Tea. We had a carousel post with an out-of-the-ordinary impression count. When we dug into the comments, we found one that made our hearts flutter, “This felt like a forehead kiss I needed today.” That comment has been our internal north star to create social content that has reached over 10M+ TikTok views and an 81% increase in engagement on Instagram. This methodology of creativity backed by social data has allowed our clients at Sasha to pitch unexpected influencer partnerships, brand collaborations, and campaigns people care about.

Matt Buttrick
Head of brand strategy at Bountiful Cow

At Bountiful Cow, we like to defy category norms and find ‘relative advantage’: the breakthrough that gets a client ahead of the pack. That’s exactly what we did for Practice Plus Group, a healthcare company that operates its own hospitals and treats both NHS and private patients.

They came to us with an ambition to break into a third, ‘self-pay’ space, where people simply pay a one-off fee for the operation they need. What followed was a collaboration between our data, insight, strategy, and creative teams that started with curiosity and questions, and ended with one of the biggest creative leaps an agency can make.

Our primary research among people in need of surgery revealed sharp insights that shaped our approach. The big ‘A’ was anxiety: patients saw the journey as superficially complex, while craving a shortcut to the care they needed. But deep down, the data showed what they were really concerned about: getting back to work quickly, not missing the summer holiday they’d booked, and fully enjoying an active retirement. Category advertising was a ‘sea of same’ – healthcare providers in blue gowns, in sterile settings – all tapping into that anxiety. We turned this on its head and plotted a new kind of entrance: one that replaced confusion with clarity and added a much-needed dose of optimism.

So, we developed an entirely new, fit-for-purpose brand, Wellsoon. Wellsoon led with its name, telegraphing the benefit of recovery, not hospital rooms, and untangling the knots of the legacy healthcare system and the intimidating world of private hospitals. We now had something rare: a brand of our own making to deploy, inform, and power the touchpoints and creativity we needed.

We then created ‘Back to your Best’, a 30-second spot that took the audience on a feel-good journey focused on the emotional benefit of getting well sooner – to enjoy a happy and active life at any age, doing the things you love. Contemporary illustration helped it stand out as a distinctive, accessible brand with a warm, friendly tone. Most satisfyingly, it worked.

Matt Kaupa
Director of analytics at lūquire

Creative breakthroughs don’t start with answers, they start with better questions. And the best ones don’t come from creative or data in isolation – they come from collaboration. At lūquire, our best work happens when the creative brief itself is co-built by data and creative leads. That’s where the magic starts. We ask things like: What emotion are we trying to spark? What’s the gap between what people say and what they do? What surprised us in the last campaign’s performance? You don’t need a mountain of data to get to a smart idea; you need a mindset of curiosity. If your data team is only validating creative after the fact, you’re missing the most powerful role they can play: shaping what gets made in the first place.

Karan Singh
General manager at Vistar Media UK

I'm excited about how data and creativity are transforming digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising when they work in harmony. While creative execution remains the heart of memorable campaigns, data has become the perfect partner – enhancing rather than replacing creative brilliance. The magic happens at this intersection: data-informed creativity delivers messages that feel personal, timely and emotionally resonant.

Programmatic's flexibility is truly revolutionary, offering the agility to adapt campaigns in real-time based on data around audience movements, weather patterns or cultural moments. This responsiveness allows creative concepts to evolve and stay relevant in ways previously impossible.

In a recent campaign for luxury brand Rituals to boost foot traffic, we used a data-driven strategy to reach high-income consumers near store locations at the right moments. We did this by leveraging movement data and proximity to stores to drive purchase intent, mixed with full motion creative to bring to life the event and spirit of gift giving. In the UK, it generated a 10% lift in brand awareness, 14% lift in consideration and 5% lift in purchase intent.

Quality first-party data is an invaluable creative resource when approached thoughtfully. Where first-party data isn't available, we should look for quality third-party data, which when married with relevant creative creates a compound effect. Think of live score data for a sporting event, for example, as the source and ways the creative can change based on this.

When using data it’s important to have three key elements: impeccable data quality collected with clear consent, actionable insights that enable meaningful personalisation and strategic alignment with core brand objectives.

When data informs creative strategy and creative excellence drives data implementation, we achieve advertising that does more than reach consumers – it creates meaningful connections with them. This powerful combination delivers campaigns that are both precisely targeted and emotionally compelling, achieving results neither approach could secure on its own.

Margaret Ngai and Kari King
Chief technology officer, and chief creative officer at RI

For those focused on customer lifecycle work, like us at RI, a culture of continuous curiosity is vital. It’s allowed us to foster a pervasive awareness of data across the entire process.

When it comes to creatives asking questions about data, our advice is to be open and ask broader questions. If you start too precisely, asking about specific data attributes, you are inferring that you already know the way to find your answer. While more open questions lead to unexpected insights from data you may not even be aware of.

Collecting and analysing customer data has taught us some surprising differences between what customers say versus what they actually do. For ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter’, we asked ourselves, ‘What are some behaviours we are seeing that you might not expect from our key segments?’.

Our data team discovered that our ‘Heart Healthy’ segment over-indexed on interacting with dessert recipes, which on the surface seemed wrong. We realised that since the brand has a halo of heart health, this segment already trusts them to meet their healthy standards, even for dessert! This insight caused us to adapt our creative content strategy leading to more engagement.

Sofia Paola Andolcetti
Strategic insights manager at DAC

Data should always be at the core of great creative work. Recently, one of our largest UK clients – a premium gym chain – asked us which types of creatives would best engage each of their key audience segments. Through our partnership with Pulsar and Audiense, and by leveraging their AI-powered technology, we were able to analyse large datasets to uncover which formats and messages resonated most with each audience. For example, one segment, couples without children, responded most strongly to emotionally driven content that emphasized connection, structure, and shared experiences. These insights directly informed the creative strategy, enabling the team to design content with greater emotional relevance and ultimately, stronger performance.

Laura Mayer
Head of data at TBWA\Chiat\Day LA

Getting to disruptive creativity starts with the bravery to ask sharper, more ambitious questions. The kind of questions that challenge assumptions, expose tensions, and reveal new perspectives. There was a time when data was seen as something that stifled creativity, a threat to the purity of uncharted territory. But today, that should be viewed as antiquated thinking. Data and creativity aren’t separate forces. When paired thoughtfully, they become magnetic. And with the right questions, that magnetism can spark powerful, inspirational breakthroughs, not just for brands, but for culture. Here are my four key principles:

1. Go From Best Practices to Provocations

Too often, data gets confined to a post-game analysis role. To be clear, that is absolutely important and valuable. However, I’ve found that the data that energises creatives isn’t always about performance indicators. It’s about understanding human behaviours, rituals, and cultures. The questions I often start with are: What moves people? What surprises them? What makes them tune out? Asking these questions often gets us to unexpected angles and opens the door to more fully formed strategic insights. Curiosity is contagious and is where the real power of data is found. This is when data goes from best practice to provocation, a lens, a launchpad, and ultimately, the spark that ignites creative potential.

2. Find the Problem Behind the Problem

Never accept a problem at face value. Sales are down? That’s the symptom, not the cause. Maybe people aren’t buying your product because they’ve stopped believing in what it stands for. Or maybe, culture has shifted, and you didn’t move with it. That’s where data becomes a superpower. It is a tool for uncovering the ‘why’ behind the behaviour. The unseen drivers, hidden belief systems, and cultural undercurrents don’t stop at identifying the trend. Ask yourself, what truth is hiding beneath it?

3. Thrive in the White Space

Some of our most effective work begins with identifying the white space: the unmet consumer need, the emotional territory no one in the category is touching, the difference between what people say they value and what they actually do. That means interrogating data for gaps, contradictions, and outliers: the anomalies that signal opportunity. That opportunity is fertile creative ground.

4. Bravery is a Team Sport

The best insights and the boldest leaps don’t come from lone provocateurs. They come from teams who trust each other enough to sit with discomfort together. From challenging the problem to asking why until we unearth the creative opportunity. Inspiring insight, the kind that leads to creative breakthroughs, is often tricky to find. If you find yourself asking a question which leads to an uncomfortable answer, that is the moment to stay curious and dig deeper.

Christian Pierre
Global chief intelligence officer & partner at GUT

We know that breakthrough work starts with a very strong data point. The internet is flooded with facts that could spark the next great idea. The problem is crafting the right questions to get there, which is why we developed GUT UnPrompt: the first promptless AI tool that is scouting the internet 24/7 to look for facts that are then served daily to our creatives to unlock creative ideation. So instead of working to pour through data, we made the data work for us.

We trained the UnPrompt algorithm by having our creatives curate five thousand random data points through one single filter – could this inspire a great idea? And with every new data point served, we get new feedback that keeps enhancing the curation of the algorithm. For example, the insight that astronauts pee inside their suit, turned into our latest Goodnites campaign ‘Mission Dry’, where we connected kids with bedwetting issues with real astronauts to break the stigma about bedwetting.

Christine DeFazio
Strategic insights vice president at DAC

Insightful data has always fuelled the most effective creative work. Today, platforms like Reddit offer a window into authentic conversations where users speak freely. By listening in on these conversations and analysing them, we gain access to a unique layer of consumer insight. This rich, real-time data can truly inspire creative ideas that resonate. For example, a major US pest control client wanted to understand user conversations around DIY pest solutions. We uncovered that most discussions on Reddit were focused on pest identification and safer treatment methods. The data also revealed that aggressive sales tactics were damaging trust, highlighting an opportunity to build credibility by addressing consumer concerns with informative, empathetic messaging.