Why this head of creative strategy thinks insights can’t exist in a vacuum

Christina Kavalauskas, global head of creative strategy at Reddit, is set to speak at the upcoming Marketing Brew Summit on September 30. Ahead of the event, we caught up with her to hear why she thinks marketers often get audience intelligence wrong, and the importance of ignoring marketing best practices that don’t serve a brand.

What do you think most marketers get wrong in their creative strategy today?

I think too many marketers let the immediate executional needs of a brand drive the creative strategy, rather than the other way around. It’s easy to get caught up on what’s trending, what needs to ship next week, or what might deliver a quick win. But when every decision is optimized for the short term, brands can lose sight of the bigger opportunity it is trying to unlock.

The strongest creative strategies do both: They respond to the moment while building toward something meaningful over time. A trend can create relevance, but it isn’t a substitute for strategic direction. The ultimate goal is to know which short-term opportunities reinforce the path you’re on—and which distract from it.

Where do you see the biggest gap between how marketers think audiences behave and how they actually behave?

This is a bit of a trick question, because the gap isn’t necessarily the marketer’s fault—it often starts with the audience intelligence they are relying on. Many of the social spaces we use for insights are inherently performative. People learn which opinions, language and behaviors generate engagement, so what they share isn’t always an honest reflection of what they think or do.

Marketers need to gut-check whether they’re observing genuine human behavior or behavior shaped by the incentives of a platform. That’s part of what makes Reddit such an interesting source of insights. Its anonymity can lower the pressure to present a polished identity, creating space for people to be more candid about their real questions, experiences, and motivations. It’s also why we can source insights from the platform from years ago that still ring true today.

You’ve built Reddit’s creative strategy around consumer insights. What’s a bet you made that the data said was wrong, and how did it turn out?

I might challenge the premise slightly. Data doesn’t always tell you an idea is definitively wrong, but it can push you toward the safest and most predictable interpretation of what people want. This is why insights can’t exist in a vacuum. When we meet with marketers and present platform insights, the immediate next question is “Ok, so what do we do with that?” The real question is whether you use insights to validate the obvious choice or uncover the more interesting one.

A good example is the r/eal Reviews campaign our team developed with Dove. Conventional marketing logic says that if you’re putting consumer testimonials at the center of a campaign, you select the most polished and positive ones. Instead, Dove committed to publishing the first 50 Reddit reviews—with permission, but without editing them—whether they were flattering, critical or somewhere in between.

The bet was that honesty would be more persuasive than perfection. That requires a brand to give up some control, which can feel uncomfortable, but it reflected a real insight about how people evaluate products today: They don’t expect universal praise; they look for enough unfiltered information to decide what is credible.

Five years from now, what’s the marketing “best practice” of today that you think we’ll all look back on and cringe at?

Our obsession with best practices. There are so many ideas circulating today—hyperpersonalize everything, be always on, react to culture in real time, use AI to produce more content. None of these practices is inherently right or wrong. The mistake is adopting them without first asking whether they serve your brand, create value for your consumers and can be executed in a way that is actually distinctive.

Five years from now, I don’t think marketers will regret failing to follow every emerging playbook. They’ll regret the times they substituted one for a point of view. The brands that make the best decisions will be the ones that know what matters to them and their consumers—and have the discipline to ignore the practices that don’t.

Name one brand or organization that’s putting out advertising you’re regularly jealous of. What makes it so good?

Nike is probably the brand whose work makes me jealous most consistently, and its six-minute “Rip the Script” film for the World Cup reminded me why. When people talk about being “social first,” they often mean making something shorter, faster, or formatted for a particular platform. This film was social first in a much more meaningful way: It was built in the language of social. Every scene was packed with references, inside jokes, fan truths and community nuance. It felt less like a traditional commercial and more like dozens of social moments stitched together into one story. The more attention you gave it, the more it gave back. And it was really fun.

The summit’s themes are insights, intuition, and integration. Which of those three is the most underrated right now—and which one are marketers leaning on too much?

Intuition is the most underrated. We often talk about intuition as knowing when to act, but in marketing it is equally important to know when not to act. A brand can identify a relevant conversation and have the ability to enter it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it should. Too many marketers focus on how to engage without spending enough time asking when—or whether—they have earned the right.

For the second part of the question, I’d say we see marketers relying too much on what they think are insights, but are actually signals that we treat as insights. Brands spend a great deal of time studying clicks, comments, trends, and conversations. But some social spaces are performative: people behave in ways the platform rewards them for. A visible behavior isn’t automatically a human truth.