GreenBook 2022 Future List Spotlight: Adam Colasanto

Editor’s Note: The following interview features a GreenBook Future List honoree, Adam Colasanto. The GreenBook Future List recognizes leadership, professional growth, personal integrity, passion, and excellence in the next generation of consumer insights and marketing professionals within the first 10 years of their careers.

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Introducing Adam Colasanto

Adam leads Vizit‘s Client and Professional Services teams, overseeing all analytic work and client relationships. Adam came to Vizit with more than a decade of experience leading consumer intelligence, market research, and data insight teams at agencies like ICUC, Edelman Intelligence, and Crimson Hexagon. He has built Vizit’s client services programs on what he believes are the core tenets of any successful client partnership: Being customer obsessed and data-driven. Adam is currently defining and bringing to marketing a new kind of research KPI which is ‘visual intelligence’ – allowing brands and marketers the ability to quantify the appeal or engagement of content for unique consumers.

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What is something you’ve recently learned from insights?

To start, two of my all-time favorite research projects were measuring how many people consider a hot dog a sandwich (it’s shockingly high) and uncovering that there is truly a subset of the US population that believes chocolate milk comes from brown cows. However, more recently and relevant to what we’re doing at Vizit: understanding how content drives purchase behavior on e-retail sites. We’re finding that the same brand and/or product has different visual engagement when measuring a Walmart vs. Amazon vs. Target shopper, which I find fascinating. We’re using this data and information to help custom curate content strategies for brands, so they are making the path to purchase for consumers more personalized and thus improving conversion.

 

What would you like the insights industry to understand about marketers, and what marketers are looking for?

The perfect marriage of Insights and Marketing is when data tells a story. As someone who has been on both sides of the aisle, there are misconceptions and bad behaviors in both worlds. Oftentimes, insights teams are limited in what the full scope of a project might be or are shackled by what results come from analysis and thus can’t apply to a practical use case. On the flip side, marketers tend to cherry-pick the most interesting data points or rely on gut instinct, experience, or subjectivity to make decisions. When these two teams can work cross-functionally and collaboratively, those barriers are stripped away, and what I find comes out are compelling data-driven narratives that guide actionable results.

 

Since starting your career in market research, what would you consider to be your greatest accomplishment?

Building a world-class Services organization from the ground up here at Vizit. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to bring on some of the best and brightest talent the research world has to offer to drive our insights engine. It goes beyond just intelligence and research-savvy though; our team is a collection of driven, creative, caring, and innovative individuals who want our customers, company, and teammates to succeed just as much as they personally want to. It’s an incredible feeling to have smart and motivated people pushing the boundaries of something brand new and seeing actionable insights come from their ingenuity and hard work.

 

If you could go back in time to when you first started your career, what advice would you give to your younger self?

Learn as much as possible from anyone and everyone, and don’t be afraid to fail. Throughout my career, I’ve met some incredible people from all walks of life, and it’s those unique and different perspectives that allow for new and interesting takes on antiquated ways of doing things. Also, failing is a part of life. Failing builds character and allows you to prove your merit in a hyper-competitive world. Failing is normal, but learning from those failures is the most important part. Being able to stay objective and assess what went wrong and what should have happened is a vital skill no matter what job or stage in life you’re in.

 

What are your market research predictions for the near future?

New ways to assess the ever-evolving cohorts of audiences will be absolutely vital. I’m not saying this because I work at an AI company (although it doesn’t hurt…), but as we see new channels explode like Twitch, Discord, and TikTok in the social-sphere, the metaverse and the impact it’s having on eCommerce, NFTs, and crypto, as well as the introduction of Gen Z into data sets and understanding how they interact with the world, we can no longer rely on purely legacy methodologies like panel and focus groups to leverage market data. We will need large-scale data aggregation that is fast, accurate, and cost-effective.