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Data-Driven Creative: A Conversation with David Loewy

 In Business Insights

Digital marketing is increasingly reliant on data-driven creative across the buyer’s journey. In the past we used data to focus on lower funnel purchasing and creative to help build awareness in upper funnel search. This is a lesson not lost on OpenMoves.

Enter, David Loewy. Loewy has walked the entrepreneur route, successfully running digital design agency, Loewy Design for 15 years. When that was sold to a Hedgehog, a Web development agency, David and his entire team stayed to build a new creative practice area. Last summer, David joined OpenMoves as Partner and Chief Creative Officer, a new role for the agency as it expands its capabilities to offer the kind of creative on which David built his reputation. We talked about what inspired him, what his move means to OpenMoves, and how the new customer journey is taking shape.

David, you followed the sale of your own smaller shop to Hedgehog and stayed with that agency for three years. Now you’re at OpenMoves – why make the move?

This was one of those moments in life when the stars were aligned: The timing was right and there were perfect complementary skill sets to build on between my core competency in creative development and digital strategy, and the amazing traffic-driving strengths of OpenMoves. Loewy Design was primarily a website design-and-build shop with some marketing. OpenMoves specializes in engaging audiences and converting prospects into leads or customers. The opportunity of providing performance-based creative services in a shop that is expert in targeting, lead conversion, and analytics was very appealing to me.

What led you to them?

I’d actually worked and partnered with OpenMoves since the early 2000s. Referring my clients to OpenMoves was a natural next step after we redesigned or launched their websites. In today’s environment, the essential qualities that separate one agency from another come down to customer satisfaction and efficiency. And my reputation in referring Loewy Design customers was dependent on keeping those clients happy for the long term to drive repeat business. I was always impressed with OpenMoves’ ability to drill down into a client’s audience and target them with laser focused PPC media, SEO, and content marketing. We had lots of synergy; they took many of the same principles of a website’s strategy and applied them to inbound and outbound marketing.

How are the principles similar?

When you’re designing and developing a website you need to define your users’ personas, map the journeys they’ll have with the brand and tailor their experience based on their intentions and where they are in their decision-making process. If we know a user is ready to upgrade their hardware, let’s say, we need to personalize their experience with the newest and latest options and then push software or peripherals secondarily as related products. It’s not really different from knowing that the users who bought these shoes would want great socks.

The same principles apply to paid digital media, email marketing, and social media except we’re able to reach them at all their digital touchpoints and at their different stages of interest (or where they are in the funnel). We can also personalize more scientifically with the data we pull from channels like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn etc.

How will the complementary skills you mentioned help OpenMoves and its customers?

First, I’m looking forward to introducing more creative services and conversion rate optimization to OpenMoves. What’s really at issue is that audience attention has become more fragmented and distributed across more devices and channels. That means the development of thumb-stopping and relevant creative becomes more and more important for sales and leads.

In my previous worlds, data and creative were primarily siloed; as I said before, data was focused on lower funnel and creative on upper. The new reality is that users are more loyal to their needs at the moment than they are to brands. Now the creative team is working side-by-side with our analysts and developing media that stretches across the user’s entire journey and is optimized for their decisive moments. Our increased focus on data driven creative will undoubtably help OpenMoves increase engagement and ROAS (return on ad spend) for our current and future clients.

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