Janet Barker-Evans, Chief Creative Officer at AbelsonTaylor Group, on why the best marketing happens when data tells creatives who to reach and instinct tells them how to move them.
Here’s a stat that should reframe how you think about targeting: reaching the right person with the wrong message is the same as reaching no one at all. That’s basically the thesis Janet Barker-Evans laid out when she joined David Finkelstein and Jessie Lee Zach on Deconstructing Data, and it’s a sharper point than it sounds. Most marketing teams treat “who” and “why” as the same question. They’re not, and the gap between them is where budgets go to die.
Barker-Evans runs creative for AbelsonTaylor Group, a healthcare-focused agency that’s been in the business for over 40 years. She’s spent her career across every channel, TV, digital, CRM, experiential, and she’s been building with AI tools since Adobe Firefly’s earliest, hand-mangling days. So when she talks about where AI actually fits into marketing, it’s not theoretical. Her team built a proprietary AI platform. They built synthetic personas of doctors. They’re using this stuff in production, every day, on health and wellness brands where getting the message wrong has real consequences.
Does AI Replace Creative Strategy, Or Amplify It?
“For a lot of people, AI still feels like this scary big disruptor,” Barker-Evans said. “But for creatives, it’s one of the most exciting things to happen in a really long time.” Her point isn’t that AI is harmless. It’s that it doesn’t replace strategy or storytelling, it amplifies it. It generates options faster, spots patterns in audience behavior a human might take weeks to find, and speeds up production. But none of that is the transformation. The transformation is what happens when you free people up.
“The real transformation happens when you pair AI with the human insight, the emotional intelligence, the storytelling. That’s when we stop just marketing at people and we start connecting with them.”
— Janet Barker-Evans, Chief Creative Officer, AbelsonTaylor Group
That’s the reframe worth sitting with. Speed for its own sake isn’t the win. The win is what your team does with the time AI hands back.
“It doesn’t just speed it for the sake of speed. It frees you up to think about other things that you could improve or other things that you could work on.”
— Janet Barker-Evans, Chief Creative Officer, AbelsonTaylor Group
AbelsonTaylor built that philosophy into an internal tool called Lexi, an AI platform trained on more than 40 years of the agency’s institutional knowledge, conversations with doctors, patients, and caregivers. It’s not ChatGPT with a new coat of paint. It’s grounded in a proprietary methodology built specifically to help strategists and writers understand an audience before they try to move it.
How Should Marketing Teams Actually Manage Their Data?
This is where the conversation got real. Everybody’s collecting more data than they need right now, and the result isn’t insight, it’s noise. Barker-Evans named the problem better than most: “Data data everywhere and not an insight found.”
“Data becomes powerful when it’s tied to real human behavior. Every point of data is a human being doing something. When you look at data and you ask it questions and you try to figure out the story behind it, you start to see the opportunities and the gaps you wouldn’t see if you just looked at the data.”
— Janet Barker-Evans, Chief Creative Officer, AbelsonTaylor Group
Her fix isn’t a tool, it’s a habit: ask what the data means instead of just what it says. She trained her creatives on this at a previous agency, and the line that stuck with her came from a chief data officer she worked with, who told her that art directors ask tougher questions than anyone else on the team. That tracks. Creatives are pattern-spotters by trade. Point that instinct at a dashboard and you get something closer to a diagnosis than a report.
David made a related point about dashboards specifically, since BDEX builds them for clients constantly. The dashboards that matter now aren’t the ones that display everything, they’re the ones you can interrogate. “You can literally just ask the AI questions about the data and then it’ll go and analyze it and give you some insights,” he said, describing how BDEX clients use conversational query tools layered on top of platforms like AWS QuickSight. Barker-Evans agreed that’s the direction dashboards are heading: less “here are the facts,” more “here’s the story, here’s the opportunity.”
What Does It Actually Mean to Target the Right Consumer?
This is the section I’d bookmark if I were you. Everyone in marketing talks about targeting like it’s a solved problem, reach the right person on the right device. Barker-Evans pushed back on that framing directly.
“It’s really not enough to just reach the right consumer. We have to reach them with the right message in the right moment, and it has to have the right emotion. That’s where magic happens, when the data and the creativity can work together.”
— Janet Barker-Evans, Chief Creative Officer, AbelsonTaylor Group
In healthcare marketing specifically, that’s not a nice-to-have, it’s the whole game. AbelsonTaylor works with rare disease brands, where a single data point represents someone going through something genuinely hard. Barker-Evans described how her team uses Lexi to understand the heuristics and cognitive shortcuts that healthcare providers rely on when making decisions, so the writers can craft messages that actually land with a specific doctor’s mindset instead of a generic one.
“Great targeting doesn’t just stop at who, it digs into why. When you understand that a doctor has a confirmation bias, and there are certain fields of medicine where heuristics and biases are prevalent for a very good reason, you can either work with them or against them depending on what you’re trying to do.”
— Janet Barker-Evans, Chief Creative Officer, AbelsonTaylor Group
This is exactly where identity and creative have to stop operating in separate lanes. David put it plainly on the show: BDEX’s job is getting the data right so brands reach the right people, but reaching them is only half of it. “You can have great data, but if you don’t have great creative, then it doesn’t matter. You have great creative, but you don’t have great data, it doesn’t matter. It really works hand in hand.” One conversation we got into that I think more marketers should be having: using AI not just to segment audiences by demographics, but to analyze personality types within an audience and vary the creative accordingly, so a “creative type” and a “pragmatic type” inside the same demographic bucket get messages built for how they actually process information, not just who they are on paper.
Is Your Tech Stack Helping Your Team, or Overwhelming It?
Barker-Evans had a line here I haven’t stopped thinking about: “Don’t build a tower you can’t climb.” There’s a new AI tool promising to solve everything roughly every week, and the instinct to chase each one is exactly how teams end up drowning in shelfware nobody actually uses.
“If your team’s overwhelmed or if the tech’s not actually supporting the creative and the strategic process, it’s just shelfware, it’s just a waste.”
— Janet Barker-Evans, Chief Creative Officer, AbelsonTaylor Group
AbelsonTaylor’s answer was to build purposefully rather than accumulate. Beyond Lexi, they built Gravitas, a synthetic persona platform populated with AI-generated healthcare providers across specialties, cardiologists, oncologists, and more, realistic enough that the team says they genuinely forget they’re synthetic mid-conversation. It lets creatives pressure-test concepts against a “doctor” before a real one ever sees the work. Alongside that, they lean on Adobe’s full suite, in part because of usage-rights clarity that matters enormously when you’re producing regulated healthcare creative. The agency also runs an internal AI center of excellence specifically to vet the constant stream of new tool requests, because, as Barker-Evans put it, the best tools are simply the ones people actually want to use.
The Bigger Picture
What stuck with me most from this conversation is how consistently Barker-Evans refused to let data and creative be treated as competing disciplines. When a campaign underperforms, the instinct is always to ask which one failed, the targeting or the message. Her answer, and honestly ours too, is that the question itself is the mistake. Neither works without the other. Data tells you who’s out there and gives you the emotional breadcrumbs to follow. Creative is what turns that into something a person actually feels. Do one without the other and you’re either shouting into a void or hitting the wrong person with a message that will never land regardless of how brilliant it is.
The agencies and brands that figure this out first, that treat identity data and creative strategy as one connected discipline instead of two departments that occasionally sync up, are going to out-execute everyone still arguing about which side gets the credit when a campaign works.
Connect with Janet Barker-Evans on LinkedIn and learn more about AbelsonTaylor Group at abelsontaylor.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.
