Designing with EQ Featuring Aaron Brody, Director, Analytics, Carat US
Welcome to Designing with EQ by Carat. In this series we take a closer look at the unique backgrounds, passions, and talents that make up the agency team, and how they come together to design for people and brands.
For August’s edition, we sat down with director of analytics, Aaron Brody. Have a read to learn more about his unique background as a creative writing major and how he uses this skillset to tell a story with data.
Q> What was your first job? What was the most important skill/lesson you learned?
Aaron> When I graduated college, I became a communications planner for a small advertising agency in New York. Unlike Carat, we did not have different teams for the many agency roles. As part of that job, I learned all the functions of running a campaign such as market research, ad ops, and digital/social planning. It taught me to be flexible and shift my day-to-day based on the different role I needed to play.
Q> How has your career evolved since you first joined Carat?
Aaron> I joined as an associate director of analytics and now I am a director of analytics. When I joined as an AD my goal was to make sure that all reports got done on time. As I moved into a director role, I focus more on measurement strategy and thought leadership. For example, questions I ask myself include, “How can we better measure our campaigns and what are new and innovative ways to tackle measurement problems within those campaigns?”
Q> What is your favorite aspect of Carat?
Aaron> I love how close our teams are. Something I heard regarding large agencies is that teams are super siloed, and it is less common to interact with teams outside of your own. That is not the case at all here. All the teams across Microsoft interact and share helpful info with other client accounts and other service lines as well.
Q> Tell us about an accomplishment you’re most proud of during your time at Carat
Aaron> As cookies are being phased out, we are losing a major way of measuring campaign success. I have been working with dentsu and Microsoft on an initiative called the Attention Economy. The work I do with Microsoft is around how we can best compile a new metric that can replace measurement using cookies. This is done by using attention as a metric. We have used it across multiple campaigns and proved its effectiveness. I am proud that we have gotten ahead of the curve for when cookies ultimately go away entirely.
Q> What is something unique about you, your background, or your role that you bring to the Carat community?
Aaron> For someone with a role in analytics, I have a unique background. I was a creative writing major in college. With this skillset, I try to bring more of a storytelling perspective into how we talk about measurement. Clients will tune out if you just throw numbers at them, so I try to tell a story with their data. I also apply this to our reports to make sure they are more narrative focused.
Q> Working at Carat I’m designing for ____?
Aaron> I am designing for data cleanliness. So much of what we do is translating data for clients so it can be easily used and read. We have moved away from static excel reports and changed the way we are reporting to make it more user friendly and readable.
Carat is uniquely positioned to design for people on behalf of brands. Our people are our greatest asset, bringing diverse backgrounds together to bring insight and emotion to marketing. Interested in learning more? Check out the Carat LinkedIn page here.
