Ain't nuthin' like a fact.

It's a great day in advertising when you're getting briefed on a job and the strategist starts dropping facts.

Like this one: In the interests of child safety, Kinder Surprise eggs are banned in America. Yet assault weapons aren't.

I'll wait for you to read that again just in case you thought you read it wrong the first time. But it's true. The toy inside a Kinder Surprise chocolate egg has been deemed a choking hazard for children so they're banned for sale in America. Assault weapons though... well, a valid driver's license and no criminal record and it's "have a good day sir, sure you have enough ammo?"

It's a deeply disturbing fact, but a fact it is.

A fact that led to this ad - and if there's a more powerful demonstration of the insanity of America's gun laws right now, I haven't seen it.

There have been some astonishingly good anti-gun ads done over the years, but there is something about this one that is so utterly persuasive, I think that in a private moment with no cameras around, even Mitch McConnell might look at it and go "Yup, you got me there."

What I love about facts is that they put real meat on the bone. They aren't opinions. They are well, facts. And a good fact makes for some very powerful advertising.

Here's a campaign that was based entirely on facts, or if you prefer, 'data'.

As a writer, what I love about a good fact is that it basically does all (or most) of the writing for you. In the Spotify example, all the writer had to do was drop that little "What did you do?" chef's kiss on it, and ta da! - they're at IKEA buying more shelving for all the awards coming their way.

The other thing that's great about facts is that they help uncover new writing territory.

Tell me to write a "this car won at Le Mans" headline, and I'll bet that every single line I write has already been written. Le Mans has been going on since 1923, which means writers have been writing "we won Le Mans!" headlines for literally a century.

What are the chances I'm going to come up with an original one? Next to zero.

But give a writer this juicy little factoid - in 1983, Porsche not only won the race, but also came in 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th and 10th - and it yields this stunner.

Dove's 'Campaign for Real Beauty' was underpinned by a research study that said that only '2% of women feel beautiful'. Always' 'Like a girl' campaign was borne from the fact that 'girls experience their biggest drop in self-confidence during puberty around their first period.'

Facts uncover fresh creative avenues that would otherwise remain undiscovered.

This great work for The Ordinary comes from the fact that most Black Friday sales are complete fabrications - "markdowns" of prices that never existed in the first place.

Here's one last little fact.

I stole the headline of this piece (For facts' sake) from a campaign that the Guardian recently ran to celebrate their 200th anniversary, and their commitment to independent investigative journalism.

I had to. It was that good.