David Thomas (Base One Creative Director) and I were presenting the "How to produce engaging and outstanding creative" session on the IDM B2B Diploma course this week and it served to highlight the reality gap between the type of creative most marketers run with and the type of creative they think they should run with. We asked the 20 or so students to score the quality of their own creative from 1 to 10, 10 being engaging and outstanding. The results - only 5 scored themselves higher than 5/10, there were 7 scoring themselves exactly 5/10 and the remainder less than 5. Was this modesty are there some fundamental things restricting the quality of creative ...?

Anybody working in a technology market will be familiar with the main analysts, Gartner et al, and the power they are perceived to have in the market. But do technology businesses give them too much "respect"? Is the wish to be placed favourably on their "magic quadrant" limiting the effectiveness of how well these same companies postion themselves and communicate their services to the market?