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Makers
Makers #3: Tradd Salvo & Taylor Smith
By building mutual trust and respect for their respective skills and creative backgrounds, Tradd and Taylor have found a way to blur the line between their disciplines that unlocks powerful insights for clients. A strategist and data analyst working this way, they say, may well be the copywriter-and-creative duo of this era.
Interview by José Simián.
Color photos by Diego Nicolau de Araujo. Photo composite by Li Sia Tan.
Tradd Salvo and Taylor Smith have to do some collective thinking to remember the exact project they first worked on together. It’s not that it wasn’t memorable—more that their mutual connection and ways of working have turned into a fluid conversation, marked by sending each other large documents highlighted with their findings and short online conversations in which they rapidly discuss insights and discard the ideas that lead nowhere. Their connection has become a template for how data and strategy can work as a unified craft to create innovative and growth-driving digital experiences.
The Makers.
Taylor Smith: I'm a Group Director of Strategy based out of Toronto, and I’ve been at Huge for six years. Before that, I worked as a strategist for creative agencies, a professor of marketing, and a product and graphic designer.
Tradd Salvo: I'm VP of Analytics, and I'm based out of Brooklyn. I've been here for three years, and in the industry for 10 years around all types of media shops, from creative agencies to experiential shops.
Taylor Smith and Tradd Salvo.
The partnership.
Tradd Salvo: Taylor was the first brand strategist I got to work with at Huge. Right after meeting each other, we started talking about how analytics and data capabilities can work with strategy, and how strategy can work with data capabilities—two disciplines that complement each other but are usually treated as silos in most agencies. I think that’s important about this story, and part of the reason why Taylor and I got off to a good start in our working relationship.
Traditionally, there's this “baton” system, where people pass the baton from strategy to analytics, back and forth, and no one's really collaborating. People are just filling in the gaps of the story, and either a strategist will take a lead and write the entire strategy and then call over for an analytics person to give them some stats, or an analytics person is writing a data story and they'll need a strategist to help them make it more of a formal narrative for clients.
I think the difference between us was that we respect each other's crafts, but it’s truly a blurred relationship between our ways of working and working styles. Perhaps because we come from a creative agency background, Taylor was cool with me writing strategy, and I was cool with Taylor doing analysis. We didn’t have hard lines: we just got a brief and were trying to solve a problem together; and we worked off each other's strengths, while also allowing the other to come into our worlds to flesh this thing out.
Taylor Smith: I would a hundred percent agree with that, and I think that runs right up and down the entire project. From the moment we start kicking something off with a client, we're just trying to figure out what’s the business problem that we are addressing for them. When we’re testing hypotheses and working through the messier aspects of the problem, that collaboration becomes really powerful because we start to find these super compelling unlocks: if we did something like this, we could drive that for the business; or it can have this impact on the brand or it can do this for the organization. And we work through those unlocks together, straight to the very end stages of the project. When we build that trust, we can create this powerful collaboration that extends into implementation and even how to measure the impact. That’s how we allow each other to be really impactful at the end of the day.
Tradd Salvo: They always say that strategy is really messy until it's not, until you have that “a-ha” moment. But most people don't realize that's exactly how analytics works, too. We have a methodology, yes, but we don't know the answers. No one knows the answer! So it's really messy until it's not, and I think that understanding both these things is why it's so important that we're both in each other's worlds. It's hard to communicate what you need when you don't know what you need because you're not there yet. I realize that’s abstract, but that's just kind of how the process goes.
Taylor Smith: I think what's been really interesting in us working together is that when we do take that collaborative approach we also work really fast, because Tradd is looking at things from a data analytics standpoint, and I'm running off and digging into earnings calls or talking to customers or research that's been done by the client and other pieces, and we're both starting to see signals that potentially indicate a path forward for us. And it’s in those moments where we start having the conversations, pointing to things we’ve each found and we think show something interesting about the problem. That’s when we bring forces together and start circling around insights, looking at them from different angles really fast. That’s where the unlock happens.
Tradd Salvo: And kill ideas that are going nowhere really quickly, as well! If we initially thought of something, and it would take me four days to do the analysis on it but we realize it doesn’t make any sense based on all the other research, we just kill it immediately and start with something more fruitful. That’s kind of fun.
Taylor Smith: When we find that thing, though, we start building a narrative around quickly. We’ve been in situations where we get a ton of data and research from clients, and when Tradd and I jump in, we start to see these things that they might have missed. And if we find that early, that interesting hypothesis, we can circle around it and then we can start building all the elements against it that allow us to show them what the path forward looks like.
I think a lot of it is that trust element, where there's no ego or anything like that there. We know our craft. We know how it's like to work together. We trust one another to push on things, to challenge things. But it's ultimately from a place of trying to get to great work. As a result of that, when Tradd finds this great piece of information, or I find this great insight on a piece of the business, we challenge each other on some of those things, and that reveals more questions that we start to address, and that leads into more interesting ways of solving the challenge for our clients. I think that becomes a natural rhythm for us— but it’s because we trust one another.
Tradd, at Huge’s Brooklyn offices, connecting with Taylor in Toronto.
An unlock.
Taylor Smith: A good example of how we work together is the one we did for a global toy brand. The question was why this brand wasn’t resonating with the girl segments—particularly early teens. This product was really well adopted by boys and even adults. And when going through the research, we saw that girls loved the world of this particular toy line; that there’s a lot that was inspiring to them. But then Tradd discovered an interesting piece of consumer insights data indicating that around the age of nine you could see a total shift in perception from girls; a decline in confidence, self awareness and more.
From that, we were able to tie it to how they perceived play, and what play meant to them, and what this particular brand meant to that space. And part of the unlock that we began to see was this line of toys —that you use to build things with— just didn’t connect with them anymore.
What was actually important for them was the ability to create meaningful connections and, ultimately, a community. And they were getting this bonding from TikTok: girls were shifting to spaces where they were playing with foam, and these homemade Play-Dohs; things that were drivers of these meaningful connections in that space. And our client wasn’t in that space.
That was the unlock: identifying that 9-year-old moment for a lot of girls where, all of a sudden, their whole life and mentality shifts, and then telling the client that there's something huge there that they were not paying attention to.
Tradd Salvo: As you can imagine, just by looking at a line chart or a bunch of line charts, you can't really just unlock it as an analyst without all this background. So the key was pulling this data together in real time along with our prior knowledge and research, and developing this narrative as on the go.
I truly believe that strategy and analytics are the new age copywriter and creatives, or copywriter and art director, kind of the classic Madison Avenue partnership from back in the day. And Taylor is a pleasure to work with. We keep trying to find more projects to work together on but it’s hard sometimes!