“We’re relying far too much on technology and automation these days to ‘innovate’ and solve our problems, and far too little on creating an environment where creativity and big ideas are welcomed,” Kyle Johnston, president of marketing and advertising agency Gigasavvy in Irvine, told the Business Journal on March 11.
Gigasavvy is holding a virtual roundtable on consumer data privacy, data sources, technology and their impacts on the world of digital advertising this Wednesday, March 24.
The scheduled panelists include Cristina Stanley, vice president of marketing at privacy-oriented internet search engine DuckDuckGo, and Robert Zibell, head of digital at streaming service Sling TV.
Companies increasingly rely on technology to target ads based on consumer preferences derived from electronic data, raising various privacy issues, Johnston said.
It’s important to “have the right people in place instead of just focusing on new machines and technology,” said Johnston, who is also a founding partner of Gigasavvy.
‘Pummeled’ by ads
He gives the example of a consumer looking online for a new mattress.
“Once you go looking for a mattress, you get pummeled by every mattress company on the planet,” according to Johnston. “But the creativity has really suffered.”
Creativity has been “replaced by this need to stay on top of technology and consumer data, how to use it to better reach audiences. But when all that gets taken away, there’s a big problem from the industry perspective,” Johnston said.
Gigasavvy clients include Chapman University, Virgin Orbit and insurance company Nationwide.
“The most important thing I’d like to get across here is that there is a clear opportunity for companies, brands, and their agencies to lean into creativity as more effective means to solving problems and meeting goals and objectives,” Johnston said.
Johnston said “agencies become much too dependent” on audience targeting.
Destroying Creativity
“If agencies put too much focus on the acquisition, manipulation, and usage of complex targeting algorithms to reach consumers, we will single-handedly destroy our original and most important value proposition, which is creativity and big ideas,” Johnston said.
“The brands are pushing that way; the industry is pushing that way. It can sort of feel like you have to stay on top of all these new methodologies with automation and what we call programmatic advertising,” Johnston said.
Viant Inc., the Irvine-based advertising software company that recently went public, leverages consumer data and other technology to aid agencies like Gigasavvy in their advertising efforts, according to Johnston, who says his firm does not work with Viant.
“We do still leverage data to better inform our efforts, but on a much different scale than the big agencies. Our expertise is more about reading between the lines of the data vs. just focusing on acquiring more,” he says.
He said the company has 20 employees in Orange County, out of a companywide total of 22.
Last year’s revenue slipped to $15.2 million from $17.2 million in 2019, due in part to the pandemic. Johnston said 2021 revenue may stay about the same.
Separately, search engine giant Google said this month it will stop selling ads based on one’s specific Web browsing, according to the Wall Street Journal. Citing privacy concerns, Google says it won’t use technologies that track individuals across multiple websites, the newspaper reported.
