The topics at Advertising Week New York tended toward the technological. Session after session explored data, marketing technology, mobile, native ads, and programmatic. But there were voices at Advertising Week still making the case that creativity and ideas were still more important than any technology.

A number of familiar themes have characterized Advertising Week: the growing ubiquity of programmatic, the transformation of advertising agencies in the digital age, the power of native advertising, and the rise of B2B marketing. But there’s one theme that seems to encompass all of the week’s other motifs, and that theme is data.

Nate Silver’s Advertising Week session, “FiveThirtyEight Breaks Down ElevenEight,” during which he took the stage with two fellow FiveThirtyEight employees, addressed the presidential election and FiveThirtyEight’s data-driven approach to analyzing the political process.

At the Native Advertising Forum, which was held Tuesday at Advertising Week in New York and sponsored by Sharethrough, several speakers presented native ads as a potential solution that could overtake interruptive advertising satisfy consumers, publishers and marketers.

Advertising Week kicked off Monday in New York, and two of the major themes for the event revolved around how the advertising world is grappling with technology and with attracting talent.