How can advertising produce more creative, more ambitious, and more daring work in the face of industry pressures and change? That was the topics of yesterday’s Guardian-hosted web chat, which Rob Meldrum, our Director of Experience Architecture, took part in alongside six other panelists. Covering everything from the challenges holding back marketers to different approaches to “process,” the group chatted about a range of themes and discussed how advertisers might begin to bring about change.

Some highlights from Rob’s contributions to the chat:

On how we can get to more creative marketing:

We are all on a quest for more creative, ambitious marketing but there are two things we, as an industry, need to embrace if we want to succeed:

1. Change. (It is necessary)
Try new things with different types of people in different ways.

2. Failure. (It is certain)
It’ll go wrong at least some of the time. But we need to try, fail, and learn from it.

On the role of data:

Data should play more of a role than it does currently. Obviously the term ‘data’ is very general, but essentially what I’m looking for in data is insight and understanding. Having more of that helps shape the brief and influence the creative. Knowing our audience (how they think, what they do, why they do it) is essential for our work to (possibly) mean something to them. Relying on gut-feel is at best old school, and at worst arrogant – data is what we need.

You can view the whole chat on Guardian Online. Just scroll through the comments beneath the feature introduction.