Sixteen years ago, when I started Base Beauty Creative Agency, we gathered data for our creative work in ways that seem archaic today. I’m not sure you could even call it data. Of course, we worked closely with our clients to learn everything they knew about their products and sales trends. We read all the trades and all the news about the brands in a client’s space. We used our product knowledge, our market knowledge, and our creative talents to craft innovative marketing campaigns. We studied creative treatments and tried to match them with sales info to determine what was working and what wasn’t. We used every tool we had at the time. It was painstaking and a little seat-of-the-pants-ish, but that’s what we had to work with then. However, we were missing one crucial piece of the puzzle: comprehensive, reliable, measurable, and meaningful data that could be assembled and analyzed quickly to show us how one campaign worked better than another, how different demographics were responding, and where the growth opportunities were.
Fast forward to today’s much-more-sophisticated digital world. We’ve all had to evolve, adapt, and embrace the amazing technology now available—and do so fast. (A shout out to our nimble and energetic Base Beauty team, who never shrinks from learning something new.) Now we are always thinking of new ways to utilize tech tools to inform and power our creative work for our clients. A case in point is our collaboration with Brandwatch for social data collection and analysis of client-owned channels and Tagger for data on competitors and assessment of influencer programs. These two vital resources fuel our holistic approach as we craft needle-moving, data-driven creative solutions for our clients.
Recently our COO Aleni Mackarey, Ph.D., MS, and Emily Horrego, our Senior Digital Marketing Strategist, led a webinar for Brandwatch that explores how we use data to drive our creativity. This webinar along with the Brandwatch case study on Base Beauty offered a detailed look at the ways in which we use data to ensure our creative solutions are on target. Their presentation shows how combining the power of quantitative data with blue-sky creative thinking sharpens strategies and produces measurable results. At Base Beauty, that’s our bread and butter.
We are not a siloed agency. Our reason for being is to remove the walls between disciplines and create truly holistic work across every single area of expertise in marketing and creative. One key insight from the webinar is a discussion of how we optimize the data we gather across all of our areas of expertise. Our team shared how we use our data-fueled learning throughout our entire organization. For example, our community management team leverages their insights to start conversations, identify celebrities and influencers for seeding programs and collaborations, strategize topics for blog posts, suggest press pitches, spark ideas for emails, and even inform design decisions on product packaging. Every department is included, which is essential to provide our clients with truly holistic solutions. And it’s all based on the data we have gathered, analyzed, tested, listened to, and added to our toolbox.
As pioneering thinkers and experts in the beauty and wellness space, we are always focused on using data to drive creativity, proving that when these two sides of the marketing equation work hand in hand, the whole is infinitely greater than the sum of its parts.