Data is great, but in a data-saturated world, it’s the unique insights that can be drawn from that information that can give marketers the edge.

Omar Johnson, CMO of Beats by Dre, has been widely quoted as saying data is useless as a means of innovation. What he means by that, he corrected at the Qualtrics Insight Summit Wednesday, is that looking at the same data that everyone else has will likely lead to the same ideas everyone else comes up with—unless that data is turned on its head and utilized uniquely.

“What I love to do is how do I pivot between the idea of data and insight to experience. The word ‘insight’ to me is the important one,” he said. “You can’t find [insight] on Wikipedia. If you think about data, you think about the platform, it’s there. Your competitor has access to it, you have access to it—you may have different ways of getting it, but it’s there.”

When Johnson came to Beats by Dre in 2012, it was abundantly clear from the data that the market, with a greater and greater emphasis being placed on cheap, brightly colored earbuds, was no place for a company making bulky high-end headphones. Headphone sales were flat, and there was more and more competition every day.

But while the product might have been a tough sell, Johnson and the rest of the marketing team found another angle with more unplowed ground to work with: they started looking at the headphones as an experiential accessory.

“Consumers were choosing things like color over quality, and people wanted something disposable. People were choosing earbuds. They were going from big headphones to small headphones,” he said. “We looked at it from an experiential perspective. … The emotion from the studio wasn’t coming through. As music lovers, we were getting less and less coming through.”

To develop their unusual marketing campaign, they set some ground rules, like the best idea always wins no matter where it comes from, always being willing to evolve and keeping the product at the center of their efforts. By taking all ideas seriously, employees from all departments soon became more invested in every step of the process, not just their part, Johnson said. The willingness to evolve has also been pivotal in finding ways to market that other companies have missed, he said.

In one 2012 campaign, the company was looking to feature a high-profile athlete, but Johnson said the most obvious candidates, like Kobe Bryant or LeBron James, all felt wrong for what they were trying to convey. When they hit on then-Celtics big man Kevin Garnett, whose sometimes-caustic reputation with fans colored his persona, the data was lukewarm, Johnson said, but there was something promising for a unique angle.

“The insight with this guy was interesting. He said, ‘Opposing fans f***ing hate me … and I love it,'” Johnson said. “And when he’d say it, he’d say ‘Opposing fans hate me,’ and his brows would furrow, but then he’d say, ‘and I love it,’ and he’d get this big beautiful smile.”

The company went with Garnett, and the result was their “Hear What You Want” campaign, showing Garnett creating a focused place for himself with music that allowed him to feed on the crowd’s negative energy. Accompanying the commercial was an unheard track (Aloe Blacc’s “The Man”) dug out of a studio that didn’t know how to categorize or sell it. The commercial is fairly abrasive, and it was difficult to get approval for its use, but it hit all the right notes—in part, Johnson said, because of how authentic to Garnett’s real-life experiences they were able to get.

Johnson said through that campaign, the company soon saw increased sales from athletes at all levels of competition trying to create that same focused spot for themselves. The song, too, got instant traction.

“Now when you hear that song, you know what that means. It’s the song they listen to before big moments, before big meetings—I’ve even heard of someone listening to it before they propose to their wife,” Johnson said. “We made headphones into armor. … People now believe when you have something tough you’re walking into, you take your music, you get ready.”

“You go back to this idea of being authentic. If I wasn’t authentic, that would have been in the can. That wouldn’t have made it on TV, it wouldn’t have made it online. But because we were authentic, because we took something real, [it connected],” Johnson added. “[The commercial] starts in a really dark place but it moves into something bright.”

Seeking authenticity and looking for ways to connect the product to common human experiences has worked for other campaigns, too. In 2015, in conjunction with the release of “Straight Outta Compton,” a biographical film depicting the roots of Dr. Dre and the rap group NWA, the company ditched their initial idea of a campaign based on a laundry list of celebrities who, like Dre, had come from Compton. Instead, Johnson said, they focused on the idea that everyone comes “straight outta” somewhere. A corresponding hashtag (#straightoutta) went viral, showing up unsolicited on celebrity social media sites, late-night television, and even from the White House.

“Instead of a $3 million photography campaign, we pivoted to an insight and spent $200,000 and that happened. That was one of the most magical things that happened in the last couple of years. We made it more experiential. It became less us shouting at you to [see the movie] and more about asking you where you were from,” Johnson said. “I still see T-shirts with that on them.”

When the brand was going to feature Michael Phelps on an ad that launched in October, Johnson said the data pointed to featuring his athletic skills or his Olympic victories. But as they watched him interact with his infant son, they pivoted to feature that other side of Phelps instead.

“If you look at the data [with Michael Phelps], most companies end up in the same place: look at him swimming, look at his muscles, look at all his medals,” he said. “We did something different because of an insight we got on set.”

The lesson Johnson said he has learned from those campaigns, and others, is that data is only half of the story. A marketer’s real job is to find a way to connect with people with their product through that data—or, in some cases, perhaps in spite of it.

“A marketer’s job is to help people express themselves … to make them think,” he said. “There’s a certain level of humanity that is brought to the data.”