Miami—Finding the right balance between marketing experimentation and data integrity is the crucial test for brands right now, according to Eddie Gonzalez, chief strategy officer at Razorfish.
“At Razorfish, we think it’s important to have both a short-term and long-term strategy, but you need to balance the way that you’re experimenting with your data integrity,” Gonzalez told us at the POSSIBLE conference.
Intentional testing drives results
For the digital agency, every test must serve a specific purpose and connect to broader objectives.
“Every experiment has to roll up into a larger strategic learning agenda that is aligned to both our short-term and long-term strategy,” Gonzalez said. “That means that every experiment we run has a specific business objective and a series of learning questions.”
This approach helps brands avoid the common pitfalls Gonzalez often observes: either testing too little out of fear of failure or testing too much without clear purpose.
“Our recommendation is you need to be out there testing, but it needs to be intentional,” he advised. “Make sure everything you’re testing is focused on driving impact and you’re doing it at the lowest effort possible so you can get things into market quicker.”
Moving beyond reactive personalization
The Razorfish executive sees predictive insights as a game-changer for personalization strategies that have largely remained reactive.
“Right now, a lot of advertisers are still doing reactive personalization. If somebody shows interest in a pair of sneakers, we follow them all over the internet with those same sneakers,” Gonzalez said.
Predictive approaches offer a richer understanding of consumers and their context.
“With predictive insights, we get a fuller picture of that consumer,” Gonzalez said. “We could identify that they’re a runner living in Massachusetts, it’s November, winter’s coming around… and provide recommendations that are actually helpful.”
Privacy-first strategies gain traction
As third-party cookies disappear, Razorfish is prioritizing “zero-party data” — information consumers intentionally share – while navigating what Gonzalez calls the “data privacy paradox.”
“People say they’re super focused on making sure their data’s private, but they’re always willing to give their data away for a 25% discount,” he noted. “It takes about nine years to build trust with a consumer, but that trust can be lost in an instant.”
The agency is investing in data clean rooms and privacy-compliant reporting solutions. “Systems where advertisers can bring in their data in a privacy-compliant way, no PII, and connect that with other partners to stitch the customer journey together,” Gonzalez said.
AI transforms content creation
Razorfish is leveraging artificial intelligence in two key areas: consumer insights and content production.
For insights, they’ve developed SEED, a synthetic research tool that accelerates the insights process.
“We can train the tool on our client’s segments and ask questions like, ‘What features are you looking for when buying an SUV?’” Gonzalez explained. “We’ve found it’s 80-85% accurate compared to real human responses.”
For content creation, the agency partners with platforms like Salesforce and Adobe to scale production efficiently.
“Social platforms like Meta want a lot of content for their algorithms to optimize,” he said. “We’re getting AI to help us create that content at scale in a way that’s more efficient than ever before.”
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