As Chief Data Officer at Mindshare, you might expect Bob Ivins to portray the future of advertising as very, er, Terminator-like. But, no, the industry’s “not all going to be some
program,” he assured attendees of OMMA’s Audience Targeting conference, on Wednesday. “I don’t think everything will move to math,” he said. Not matter how good the
algorithms get, advertising won’t “always be a math expression.” Why? For one, creativity can’t be quantified (yet), Ivins said. Meanwhile, beyond larger patterns, people are
really unpredictable. “I look at my own sporadic behavior when I walk into the grocery story,” Ivins remarked. “No one can predict that.”