Laura Forester, Director of Strategic Planning at Gravity Global, on why more dashboards isn’t the same as more decisions, and how the best marketing teams turn data into narrative instead of just noise.
Fifteen percent. That’s how much of what makes a child healthy actually happens inside a doctor’s office, according to research Laura Forester brought up on Deconstructing Data. The other 85 percent is housing, community, emotional well-being, the stuff that never shows up in a clinical dashboard. She used that stat to make a bigger point about marketing data in general, and it’s one I haven’t stopped thinking about: the number by itself is just a fact. What you do with it, the story you build around it, is where the actual value lives.
Forester leads US brand strategy and strategic planning at Gravity Global, a global agency with 14 offices and 400-plus people spanning the west coast of the US to Vietnam. Her path there wasn’t a straight line through marketing, it ran through a fellowship in DC, an internship at Edelman, and a master’s degree in philosophy from Trinity College Dublin. That background shows up in how she talks about data. She’s not interested in numbers for their own sake. She’s interested in what the numbers are actually trying to tell you.
Can Data and Storytelling Actually Work Together, Or Are They Opposites?
The conventional wisdom treats data and storytelling as opposing forces, one rational, one emotional, that marketers have to awkwardly reconcile. Forester rejects that framing outright.
“Data and storytelling are often viewed as opposites, one really rational and driven by analytics, one really emotional. But the unlock is that they can be a powerful force when used together. The data can tell us what’s happening, but storytelling tells us why it matters.”
— Laura Forester, Director of Strategic Planning, Gravity Global
Her sharpest line on this might be the one that reframes what marketing is even trying to do in the first place: “You don’t persuade people, you have to move them.” Persuasion is a numbers game. Moving someone is an emotional one. Forester’s argument is that you need the data to find where the emotional opening actually is, then the story to walk through it.
At Gravity, that shows up in a framework built around three pillars that fuel brand performance: fame, admiration, and belief. The data’s job is finding where those levers exist for a given brand. The story’s job is pulling attention toward them, ideally disproportionate attention relative to the competition.
What Does It Mean to Make Data More Human?
Forester made a comment I want every marketer reading this to sit with for a second: “We now have enough data to get close enough to insult somebody or inspire them.” That’s the tightrope. The same granular data that lets you build a genuinely resonant message is exactly what makes it so easy to creep someone out instead.
“I talk a lot about making data more human. So it’s not just pixels or periods, but those are people like you and I, clicking, shopping, buying.”
— Laura Forester, Director of Strategic Planning, Gravity Global
This connects directly to something David talks about constantly on the identity side of the business. BDEX doesn’t just build audiences off a handful of surface-level attributes, it models deep enough into first-party data to build genuinely resonant lookalike audiences, even when that means a smaller list. Forester’s point from the creative and strategy side is the mirror image: once you have that level of resolution on a person, the responsibility to use it well goes up, not down. Getting close enough to someone to genuinely move them and getting close enough to feel invasive are separated by a thinner line than most marketing teams want to admit.
She also pointed to where this is heading next: synthetic audiences. Gravity’s AI center of excellence is prototyping the ability to create engineered audience personas that brands can literally ask questions of, testing messaging against a synthetic version of their audience before it ever goes live. Her caveat matters as much as the capability: that synthetic layer only works if it stays “fueled by the kind of real world experience,” meaning it’s grounded in actual behavioral data, not a guess dressed up as a persona.
What Is DRIP and Why Is It Killing Your Marketing Strategy?
This is the framework from the episode I think deserves to spread. Forester coined it, and it’s blunt in exactly the right way: DRIP, Data Rich, Insight Poor.
“DRIP is when a team is collecting data faster than they can interpret it, connect it. For me, that means we have more dashboards than decisions.”
— Laura Forester, Director of Strategic Planning, Gravity Global
If that sentence stings a little, it’s supposed to. Most teams don’t have a data volume problem, they have a data application problem. Forester’s advice isn’t a new tool, it’s a mindset shift: don’t just read the data, feel it. What tension lives inside that number? What emotion is underneath the trend line?
David made the connective point live on the show, and it’s one worth repeating to any team stuck in DRIP mode: figure out your outcome and your goals before you decide what data to collect, not after. Most teams do it backwards, they hoover up everything on the theory that more data equals more optionality, and then they’re too buried in it to extract anything useful. Forester’s version of the same idea: “If we don’t know what success looks like, it’s going to be really hard to build a plan to get there.” She runs every engagement through three questions before anything else: Who’s this for? What are we trying to achieve? And what else might be possible beyond the initial ask?
“I think we all need to be a little more open-minded and willing to admit we don’t yet have an answer. We have data, but I think being brave enough to sit with what this means and explore it a bit is what’s going to fuel creativity and business growth.”
— Laura Forester, Director of Strategic Planning, Gravity Global
What’s Actually in a Modern Marketing Tech Stack?
Forester’s stack picks were a genuinely interesting mix, and none of them were the tools you’d expect a strategist to name first. First up was Sendoso, the corporate gifting and direct mail platform. Her framing was sharper than “we send gifts”: “Sendoso helps us act on intent and make it feel really personal, like sending a story, not just a message.” It’s a tool for building memories, not just logging metrics.
Second was Demandbase, the account-based marketing platform, which she described as the bridge between anonymous web signals and actual narrative. “Taking almost anonymous signals, web intent, engagement data, and turning them into a narrative, not just about who’s clicking but why.”
The third pick wasn’t a marketing tool at all, and that was the point. Forester name-dropped HistoSonics, a medical device company using focused soundwaves (a technique called histotripsy) to non-invasively treat tumors without surgery. She wasn’t recommending it as martech. She was holding it up as a model for what technology should do everywhere: amplify humanity instead of replacing it. “This idea of data and tech helping heal disconnection is crazy. I would look them up. What they’re doing is out of bounds.”
The Bigger Picture
The thread running through this whole conversation is that data volume and data value are not the same thing, and most marketing teams are optimizing for the wrong one. You can have every dashboard, every integration, every signal piped into one clean view, and still have no idea what to do next. Forester’s framework, and honestly the whole reason BDEX exists, comes down to the same idea from two different angles: data only becomes useful the moment someone asks what it means for a real person on the other end of it.
If your team has more dashboards than decisions right now, that’s not a data problem. That’s a DRIP problem. And the fix isn’t another tool, it’s someone willing to sit with the number long enough to find the story inside it.
Connect with Laura Forester on LinkedIn and learn more about Gravity Global at gravityglobal.com.
This article was adapted from an episode of Deconstructing Data, BDEX’s weekly podcast on data-driven marketing. Tune in live every Thursday at 4:15 PM Eastern on LinkedIn.
About BDEX: For companies that need clean identity data to power their products, BDEX offers unmatched quality and execution. Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert” to get started.
