After scratching some more notes down on this subject and reading through my daily diet of web marketing articles – a suddenly realized I left out a key component (or is it?) to the New Marketers ever-evolving skill set. CREATIVITY. That's right, perhaps the creative instinct is taking a back seat to number crunching and metric-trend perdiction (which is about as creative as it sounds) but is that all New Marketing should be about?

There's a glaring different between these two opposing sides of the marketing brain. One, the creative side (being able to come up with the campaign – screw the strategy) and the analytical side (which waits for some one to START the trend, but then works feverishly to come up with the better strategy to implement or tap into said trend).

So what's the difference? To the bottom line (and thus to the business being marketed) probably not much. But the world of marketing really deserves both – CREATIVE and ANALYTICAL. A new marketer has to step out from conventional definitions of both. Creative deals with more than just pretty art. After all, how creative design-wise can you get with a Facebook page? Hmm. Your thumbnails?

Creative engagement is what it is about. Like when McDonald's froze their coffee inside huge blocks of ice and left them on street corners in some metropolitan city. Sure they could have given free coupons away, but a block of ice, placed outside of a traditional advertising context…that's creative engagement.

In short, I wanted to apologize for leaving that one essential skill off the New Marketers table. Because it's all about engagement…remember…and everyone remembers the person from the party who spoke the best, told the best jokes, and listened intently. So, sure you can show up to the party because you know you "have to" be there, but while you're there, you might as well stand out and be remembered.