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Meet João Félix da Costa – How Covid Became An Opportunity To This Communication Group
Today we have selected João Félix da Costa to take his interview. He is the Chief Executive Officer at Gigantic Digital Growth.
First of all, how are you and your team doing in these COVID-19 times?
We are doing great because we turned Covid into an opportunity.
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined this company?
Gigantic is a start-up founded in the Lusophone communication group Born, present in Portugal and Angola (Africa).
I confess that the first month at Covid was particularly difficult because we had already dealt with the Ebola crisis in Africa, and we knew what was coming, namely the change of habits in our lives.
We didn’t expect that the marketing and advertising world would pull back so much. At one point, almost all of our contracts were canceled.
Being entrepreneurs, my partners and I immediately thought about turning it around and recovering an old goal that we had, which was to create a Digital Performance company.
A digital agency that would focus not on channels (organic/website/social networks /paid Media) but on results. In other words, we would use all existing digital tools, from business intelligence to CRM, to generate business for our clients.
At the same time, while we were developing Gigantic, we felt that the whole market was starting to make the digital transition and started looking at digital as a critical part of their business.
How does your company innovate?
Being Gigantic, a Digital Performance company, our challenge is always to generate sales or leads for our customers.
Increasing sales continuously makes our entire company philosophy to be developed around Innovation.
Innovation is done through research, testing new platforms, new strategies, always under the pressure/drive of generating sales for our clients.
This makes Innovation really at the heart of our company.
How the Coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?
For Gigantic, the Coronavirus pandemic turned out to be a positive because it accelerated the digital transition.
Gigantic fuels that digital transition and helps its clients lead with these difficult times by giving them clarity about how to generate more revenue through digital channels.
Did you have to make difficult choices and the lessons learned?
The big lesson of the pandemic for many entrepreneurs is simple, in every great crisis, there is an opportunity.
There is a change from the status quo, which allows the most prepared and agile to triumph in these difficult contexts.
Our tough choices decided how much time and resources we would invest in this opportunity.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?
We have always worked very remotely, with different teams constantly working and traveling across Europe and Africa.
We have always used Slack for that purpose, and now we use Google Chat in Gigantic, which is quite equivalent.
In this sense, we had a competitive advantage since the whole team was already used to working remotely and physically separated from each other.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
Well, not wanting to give visibility to our competitors, I would say that all the big international media groups like Publicis, WPP, Publicis, and now consultancies like Accenture and Deloitte are more organized for the channel than to generate results and sales for their clients are our competitors.
We plan to stay ahead of the game, growing rapidly into new European markets but keeping the same ambition, capacity to innovate, and the agility that characterizes a Start-Up.
Your final thoughts
Thank you for this interview, and I wish you all a fantastic and healthy 2022.
• Spokesperson: João Félix da Costa
• Company: Gigantic Digital Growth
• Website: https://www.gigantic.pt/en/
• Company: Gigantic Digital Growth
• Website: https://www.gigantic.pt/en/
