GBK Employee Spotlight: Rob Da Silva, EVP, GBK Collective
GBK Employee Spotlight is a series designed to surface the stories of the amazing individuals across our team and what makes them tick.
Today for our employee spotlight series, we chatted with Rob da Silva who is joining GBK Collective as Executive Vice President in our LA office, working closely on strategic engagements and projects with our growing client base.
Rob has an extensive and interesting background, having worked with dozens of major brands across industries, most recently in senior leadership positions at Kantar and Ipsos. From qualitative and quantitative research to inform brand strategy, equity and positioning to helping brands measure their cross-channel marketing investments, his career has run the gamut.
Prior to joining GBK Collective, Rob held senior roles with Kantar and Ipsos, overseeing tracking, concept and advertising testing, as well as brand equity and brand development studies. Let’s learn more about him.
Q: Tell us a bit about yourself, your prior career and what led you to join GBK.
I first started working in market research when I was a teenager. I was born and raised in Toronto, and one of my first jobs was advertising research for consumer brands centered around children and teens. If you think of those catchy kids’ breakfast cereal commercials, chances are you remember some pretty cool toys and free premiums you could rip open the box to find. The focus of my job was helping companies decide what types of new things coming out or advertising resonated best among these younger consumers.
That was my entry point into market research, and from there, I started down a more traditional path. I spent several years working with clients in the automotive space – primarily focused on ad testing – followed by brand equity, brand tracking and segmentation work with financial services companies, as well as tech companies such as XBox, T-Mobile, Cingular Wireless and AT&T. I then moved into media entertainment, where I specialized in ad testing for TV launches, program premiers and movies. Ultimately the company I worked for was acquired by Ipsos, where I continued to build my experience in media content and entertainment.
When I joined Kantar, I set out to learn more about the digital ecosystem and how to measure it effectively. My passion for the space led to a role as global product leader and SVP for the firm overseeing media measurement solutions, as well as analytics. In addition to developing a deeper understanding of the evolving digital media landscape, I learned how to better measure cross-platform advertising effectiveness applying different methodologies and approaches.
Coming to GBK was the next natural step in my career given the firm’s extensive experience applying strategic insights, advanced analytics and measurement to help clients improve ROI for their marketing investments. Not only does the direction of the firm align perfectly with the areas where and I want to continue to learn and stretch in my career, GBK’s approach also stands out.
In contrast to other firms where research deliverables are often productized, GBK provides a deeper level of strategy consulting to its clients – applying strategic insights, analytics and leading academic expertise to help clients solve their most pressing business challenges.
Q: What will your role at GBK focus on, and what are you most looking forward to?
My role will focus on working with clients across industries to advise them on marketing strategy, brand equity, customer segmentation, advertising effectiveness, among other areas. In addition to delivering results for clients and improving ROI for their marketing investments, I’m thrilled to partner with the collective GBK team, including a tremendous roster of colleagues and thought leaders, several of whom I’ve worked with before.
On the client side, I’m excited to help an incredible list of organizations drill into the right business questions, find the right consultative approach, and use the right data and analytics to determine where we can drive strategic insights.
Q: What are the biggest success factors for companies as they look to improve ROI for marketing, analytics, insights or related areas?
There isn’t always a simple answer to this question. Although people always want to find a shortcut, oftentimes there just isn’t one. Companies today have access to more data than ever before, but it's not the volume of data that matters, but the quality. Marketers have to define the right metrics to measure to effectively improve ROI, and this requires constant learning and experimentation.
What's driving success can be very complex and confusing. Most people just default to measuring short-term metrics because they're easy; people look at things like short-term sales numbers, website visits and clicks, and so on.
The key, however, is to apply the right analytics and thought behind all that data to really understand what matters for both short-term and long-term growth. And you need to understand how to measure it. Key questions to ask include:
What are my key metrics?
Do I have the best data in place for measurement?
Once my measurement framework is in place, how am I going to experiment, or test and try different approaches in order to improve?
As you go along, you have to be open to constant learning and experimentation. Obviously applying big data and analytics plays a huge role in future success, but it's not all about AI and computer algorithms. People need to draw connections and understand the insights behind the data to inform strategy and decision making.
Ultimately AI can only get you so far. Having the right people on your team, and the right insights to understand data really is what matters. And of course, at the end of the day, you have to be able to show what you're doing has an impact.
Q: Outside measurement, what are the biggest challenges facing marketers and brands today in your opinion?
One challenge is the world is a complex place and it’s continuing to get more complex. You can collect more data, on more people, than ever before. So you have a thousand ways in which to segment people based on oceans and oceans of data. The kicker is that people rarely know what data they should be using. Sometimes they don’t even know who they should be targeting or what the business outcome should be. It’s challenging to maintain focus on what it is that you need to do, or measure, when you don’t have alignment on your goals and priorities.
To illustrate, let’s think of a simple example – like a creative brief. If you ask the ad agency to define the goal or target of the creative, you might get one answer. If you ask your media agency the same question, you can get another answer. And the CMO gives you an entirely different answer. So you have three different answers to exactly the same question. Why? Because there's usually multiple competing goals, and no way to chase them all.
The same problem often surfaces when you’re trying to take action – whether it's increasing sales, building brand loyalty, or driving customer engagement. There are thousands of actions the company wants to take, but you can’t possibly do them all. And on the flip side, being too narrow in scope may mean that you’re targeting people who would have bought your product anyway. So you need to clearly define your priorities, get everyone on the same page - with full buy-in on what it is you’re trying to accomplish.
This is oftentimes a daunting challenge.
Q: What’s a fun fact about you that many people may not know?
That one’s easy. Many people don’t know that I’m a huge Formula 1 fan. I love fast cars, and in particular I've been following Formula 1 for a very long time; as long as I've worked in market research actually. My friends and I all started going to Formula 1 races when I was maybe 20 years old. And the same group of us visits Montreal every year to go see a Formula 1 race.
Looking back, it’s incredible that I've been doing it with the same core people for almost 30 years now. Two of whom I worked with originally, way back when I first started in my breakfast cereal market research days.