This article was originally published by Adweek
Rick Stallings describes his day-to-day responsibilities as “change management” and “transformation through education.” In other words, he helps clients understand data well enough to interpret the numbers for themselves—and to ask the right questions when it comes to their own businesses.
Through the Agile ID approach, the 34-year-old and his fellow Omnicom teams aim to take analytics from a source for post-campaign case studies to a “pre-look” tool that can help with everything from brand strategy to new business pitches.
When he first joined OMD as an assistant strategist 10 years ago, the iPhone was brand new, digital marketing had “very few rules and low expectations” and agencies had to persuade their clients to build mobile apps. This year, digital will account for more than 50 percent of total ad spend in the U.S. for the first time.
Before joining PHD in 2017, Stallings spent several years at ad-tech companies Collective (now Visto) and Omnicom-owned Accuen, where he specialized in “connecting mobile usage to TV behavior” and familiarizing himself with an ever-evolving sales model.
So when will the analytics discipline truly advance to its next phase? “I’d love to think that, at the end of 2019, we will put a period at the end of the sentence,” Stallings says. “But we’ll never really be satisfied, which is pretty exciting.”
Congratulations, Rick!
